Irish regulators slapped Fb mother or father Meta with a 265 million-euro ($277 million) nice Monday, the corporate’s newest punishment for breaching strict European Union knowledge privateness guidelines.
The Information Safety Fee mentioned Meta Platforms infringed sections of the EU guidelines, referred to as the Common Information Safety Regulation, that require technical and organizational measures aimed toward defending consumer knowledge.
The watchdog opened an investigation final yr into information stories that knowledge on extra 533 million customers was discovered dumped on-line. The information was discovered on a web site for hackers and included names, Fb IDs, telephone numbers, areas, birthdates and e-mail addresses for folks from greater than 100 international locations, in accordance with the stories.
Meta mentioned the info had been “scraped” from Fb utilizing instruments designed to assist folks discover their buddies by telephone numbers utilizing search and speak to import options. The watchdog mentioned it investigated the automated scraping carried out between Might 2018 and September 2019.
The corporate mentioned it had “cooperated totally” with the Irish watchdog.
“We made modifications to our techniques in the course of the time in query, together with eradicating the flexibility to scrape our options on this method utilizing telephone numbers,” Meta mentioned in a press release. “Unauthorized knowledge scraping is unacceptable and towards our guidelines.”
Together with the nice, the fee mentioned it additionally imposed on Meta a “vary of corrective measures,” which weren’t specified.
When requested if Meta would attraction, a spokesman mentioned, “We’re nonetheless reviewing this resolution fastidiously.”
It’s the most recent in a collection of punishments that the Irish watchdog has levied towards Meta over the previous two years.
The corporate, primarily based in Menlo Park, California, has its European headquarters in Dublin, which makes the Irish authority its lead privateness regulator underneath the EU’s Common Information Safety Regulation, in a system referred to as “one-stop store.”
The Irish watchdog fined Meta-owned Instagram 405 million euros in September after it discovered that the platform mishandled youngsters’ private info. Meta was fined 17 million euros in March for its dealing with of a dozen knowledge breach notifications.
Final yr, the watchdog fined Meta’s chat service WhatsApp 225 million euros for violating guidelines on sharing folks’s knowledge with different Meta firms.
