New Delhi: Meta Platforms has been fined €265m ($277 million) by the Irish data watchdog for violating European privacy rules, taking European fines against Facebook’s parent company to over $900 million since last year. Meta has been penalised over the 2021 data breach, that led to the personal information of over 500 million Facebook users being published online.
A “significant” number of the users were from the European Union. Along with the fine, the watchdog has also “imposed a reprimand and an order” requiring the Mark Zuckerberg-led company to “bring its processing into compliance by taking a range of specified remedial actions within a particular timeframe”.
User data including Facebook IDs, names, phone numbers, addresses, birthdates, and email addresses of individuals from more than 100 different countries were discovered online last year, after which the Data Protection Commission (DPC) initiated a probe. DPC is responsible for regulating Meta across the EU.
The commission said that the company had infringed two articles of the EU’s data protection laws, The Guardian reported.
Meanwhile, Meta said it made changes to its systems during the time in question, including removing the ability to scrape their features in this way using phone numbers. “Unauthorised data scraping is unacceptable and against our rules,” Meta said.
The Irish regulator, in a statement, said that other relevant EU regulators have agreed with the decision issued on Monday after it shared a draft ruling with them last month under the bloc’s “one-stop shop” system of regulating large multinationals.
While this is the most recent of several penalties imposed on Meta by the Irish watchdog, it was last fined €405 million in September for letting teenagers set up Instagram accounts that publicly displayed their phone numbers and email addresses. In March, the watchdog fined Meta €17 million for further GDPR breaches.
WhatsApp data leak
On Saturday, meanwhile, Cybernews reported that 487 million WhatsApp users’ phone numbers have been hacked and are being sold on a hacking forum. The data, allegedly contained in a database from 2022, belongs to users from 84 countries, including the US, UK, Egypt, Italy and India, the report added.
However, Meta-owned WhatsApp has denied it, stating that the damaging report is based on “unsubstantiated screenshots” and there is “no evidence of a ‘data leak’.”
