Meta entangled in $275 million data privacy violations fine penalty

Data privacy violations – In order to punish Meta for failing to stop hackers from stealing personal information from more than 500 million Facebook users in a 2019 data leak, Ireland’s data privacy authorities levied a punishment of over $275 million.

With Monday’s announcement, the Irish Data Protection Commission, the principal privacy watchdog in charge of policing Meta’s activities in Europe, imposed a fine for the fourth time in about a year on Facebook (FBparent )’s corporation. The commission stated that the decision to issue the fine was taken last Friday.

Since the autumn of 2021, Ireland’s DPC has fined Meta 912 million euros for allegedly violating the General Data Protection Regulation, the continent’s most important data privacy regulation, along with its two subsidiaries, Instagram and WhatsApp.

The second-largest GDPR punishment in history was levied on Meta earlier this autumn for Instagram’s handling of children’s data, totaling 405 million euros. Other enforcement efforts resulted in fines of 17 million euros and 225 million euros, respectively, in March 2022 and September 2021.

A representative for Meta said in a statement on Monday that the company was “seriously” examining the DPC’s decision and that it had cooperated entirely with the agency’s probe.

After Business Insider revealed that the personal information of more than a billion Facebook users had been exposed on a dark web hacker website, the investigation got underway in April of last year. Facebook said at the time that hostile actors had misused its contact importer tool to compare known phone numbers to Facebook user accounts before extracting more data from those profiles.

“Protecting the privacy and security of people’s data is fundamental to how our business works,” Meta said in Monday’s statement. “We made changes to our systems during the time in question, including removing the ability to scrape our features in this way using phone numbers. Unauthorized data scraping is unacceptable and against our rules and we will continue working with our peers on this industry challenge.”