The Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC), the main regulator in the field of data protection in the European Union, has imposed a fine of 265 million euros on Meta, the parent company of Facebook. This new fine brings to almost 1,000 million euros the total sanctions imposed on the technology giant, which has another 13 investigations pending by the Irish regulator.
The American company, chaired by Mark Zuckerberg, has its European base of operations in Dublin, has been sanctioned for a failure in its security systems that caused the leak of personal data of millions of users between 2018 and 2019.
The DPC launched this investigation in April of last year to determine how the names, phone numbers and email addresses of 533 million customers got onto an internet forum on hacking.
Mark Zuckerberg, creator of Facebook and CEO of Meta
JOSH EDELSON / AFP
Then, Facebook claimed that it had repaired that “vulnerability” in 2019 and that the aforementioned information, part of which had already appeared in cyberspace “several years ago”, was not obtained by hacking, but through the so-called scraping. Scraping is a technique that allows obtaining data from reading a website thanks to automated software, after which this information can be distributed in online forums.
The fine is “significant” because the volume of data was very large, there had already been precedents for ‘scraping’ and the problems could have been identified earlier
However, the Irish regulator today determined that Meta breached Article 5 of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). “Because this dataset was so large, that there had already been precedents for scraping on the platform, and that the issues could have been identified earlier, we ultimately imposed a significant fine,” DPC head Helen Dixon said in a statement. .
He also recalled that the “risks” for affected individuals are “considerable”, since they expose them to “scams, spam, fishing” and “lose control of their data.”
In a note, Meta notes that it has made “changes to our systems during the time in question, including removing the ability to scrape our features.”
Last September, the technology company appealed to the Irish High Court a fine of 405 million euros imposed by the DPC on the Instagram social network, integrated in Meta, for its management of minors’ data. This is the highest financial penalty imposed by the commission.
The Irish Data Protection Commission regulates Apple, Google, TikTok and other tech giants because of the location of their European Union headquarters in Ireland. It currently has 40 investigations open on these companies, including the 13 that affect Meta.
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