UNITED STATES: Following a breach that resulted in the online publication of the personal information of more than 500 million users, Facebook’s owner was assessed a fine by the Irish data watchdog of €265 million (£230 million).
When information about Facebook users worldwide was scrapped from public profiles in 2018 and 2019, the Data Protection Commission (DPC) claimed that Meta had violated two articles of the EU’s data protection laws.
Last year, when the information surfaced on a hacking website, the DPC, which oversees Meta in the EU, launched an inquiry. A “significant” portion of the users, according to the watchdog, were from the EU.
Since September of last year, Meta has been subject to roughly €1 billion in fines from the DPC. The watchdog fined Meta €17 million in March for additional GDPR violations and €225 million for Meta’s WhatsApp in September of last year for “severe” and “serious” GDPR violations.
Meta was hit with a €405 million fine in September for allowing teenagers to create Instagram accounts that publicly displayed their phone numbers and email addresses.
One legal professional, however, questioned whether the General Data Protection Regulation of the EU will be enforced strictly enough to have the deterrent impact it was meant to have.
Meta stated in a 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. Unauthorised data scraping is unacceptable and against our rules.”
Since Apple, Google, TikTok, and other technology platforms have their EU headquarters in Ireland, the DPC is responsible for regulating them. It has 40 open investigations investigating these businesses at the moment, 13 of which involve Meta.
The Irish regulator, which shared a draft judgement with them last month as part of the EU’s “one-stop shop” approach for supervising large corporations, said in a statement that other relevant EU regulators concurred with the decision made on Monday.
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