The Irish watching slapped a $277 million fine on Meta for breaching data privacy laws in Europe, bringing the social media giant’s total fines to up to $1.04 billion.
In addition to the fine, the authority imposed a reprimand and an order “to bring [Meta’s] processing into compliance by taking a range of specified remedial actions within a particular timeframe,” the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) said in a statement.
Monday’s fine is the fourth the DPC has levied against one of Meta’s companies.
The penalty resulted from an investigation, started last year into the discovery of a collated set of personal data that had been scraped from Facebook between May 2018 and September 2019, and made available online.
Personal data of EU Justice Commissioner Didier Reynders, Luxembourg Prime Minister Xavier Bettel and dozens of EU officials were included in a leak of the 533 million records including phone numbers, Facebook IDs, full names and birthdates that surfaced on a public forum and circulating widely on the web.
Meta said it had cooperated fully with the investigation by Ireland’s Data Privacy Commissioner and made changes to its systems during the time in question, including removing the ability to scrape its features in this way using phone numbers.
In September, DPC hit Meta’s Instagram subsidiary with a record fine of $420 million, which the company plans to appeal.
Meta added in its statement on Monday that it was reviewing the decision related to the latest fine.
The DPC regulates Apple, Google, Twitter, Tiktok and other technology giants due to the location of their EU headquarters in Ireland. It currently has 40 inquiries open into such firms.
The regulator has the power to impose fines of up to 4% of a company’s global revenue under the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation’s “One Stop Shop” regime introduced in 2018.
As per their statement, DPC’s inquiry was thorough and involved the cooperation of data protection supervisory authorities who collectively agreed to this decision.
