Meta Is Fined $275 Million By The Irish Data Privacy Authorities

In a data breach that occurred in 2019, Meta was issued a fine of approximately $275 million by Ireland’s data privacy commission for its failure to prevent hackers from stealing the personal information of more than 500 million Facebook users.

The announcement made on Monday marked the fourth time in about a year that Facebook (FBparent )’s corporation had been punished by the Irish Data Protection Commission. The Irish Data Protection Commission is the major privacy regulator monitoring Meta’s operations in Europe. According to the commission’s statement, the decision to issue the fine was reached on Friday of last week.

Meta has been hit with fines totaling 912 million euros by the Data Protection Commission of Ireland (DPC) since the fall of 2021. The DPC is pursuing the social media giant and its other subsidiaries, Instagram and WhatsApp, for alleged violations of the General Data Protection Regulation, which is Europe’s signature data privacy law (GDPR).

In the early fall of this year, Meta was handed the second-largest GDPR fine in history, which was for the way in which Instagram handled the data of children. The fine was 405 million euros. Additional enforcement procedures, which took place in March 2022 and September 2021, respectively, resulted in the imposition of fines totaling 17 million and 225 million euros.

A representative for Meta issued a statement on Monday stating that the company was “seriously” analyzing the decision made by the DPC and that it had cooperated fully with the investigation being conducted by the agency. The investigation was kicked out in April of last year after it was reported by Business Insider that the personal information of more than half a billion Facebook users had been published on a hacker website. At the time, Facebook stated that hostile actors had used its contact importer tool in order to match known phone numbers to the accounts of Facebook users before extracting more information from their profiles. According to a statement released by Meta on Monday, “Protecting the privacy and security of people’s data is crucial to how our business works.” [Citation needed] “During the time in question, we implemented a number of changes to our systems, one of which was the removal of the capability to scrape our features in this manner by using phone numbers. The scraping of data without authorization is against both our policy and our terms of service, and we will continue to collaborate with our competitors to find a solution to this industry problem.

This judgment was made by the Irish Data Protection Commissioner in the midst of widespread criticism from privacy activists who claim that regulators have proceeded slowly and tentatively to enforce GDPR, which became law in 2018.

Privacy regulators in Luxembourg issued a punishment of 746 million euros to e-commerce giant Amazon (AMZN) in accordance with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) last year. They did so on the grounds that the manner in which Amazon processes personal data is in violation of the law. Amazon (AMZN) is attempting to get the penalty overturned.

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