Meta receives a record $277M fine for leaking data of billions of users
The penalty is one of the largest under the EU’s GDPR data law
Meta was fined $277 million for negligence in failing to prevent the leak of personal data of more than half a billion users on its Facebook network.
The Irish Data Protection Commission, the primary privacy regulator for Meta, assessed the fine following an examination that indicated the social network company omitted strict controls required by the comprehensive General Data Protection Regulation of the EU.
In addition to paying the third-largest GDPR penalty, the watchdog mandated that Meta’s Irish branch is also required to make sure its data processing complies with the law.
The Irish government is keeping an eye on some of the major Silicon Valley IT firms that have operations in the EU, including Meta. They began after finding a collected collection of Facebook personal data was available online.
533 million Facebook users’ phone numbers and email addresses from all across the world were discovered on a hacker website last year.
The Facebook Search, Facebook Messenger Contact Importer and Instagram Contact Importer tools between May 2018 and September 2019 were the main subjects of the investigation.
The social networking site previously claimed that the information is out-of-date and that the problem was found and fixed in 2019. Meta said that they collaborated extensively with regulators and that protecting the privacy and security of people’s data is crucial to how their business functions.
When the GDPR went into effect in May 2018 and granted European data watchdogs the authority to impose fines up to 4% of a company’s yearly revenue, their authority increased suddenly. The largest fines under GDPR to date have been a record €746 million charge against Amazon.com Inc from Luxembourg’s primary privacy authority, followed by €405 million and €225 million fines from the Irish regulator for Meta’s Instagram and Whatsapp subsidiaries.
