According to Meta's handling of sensitive user data, the Irish Data Protection Commission has fined the company $276 million.
The European Union's primary privacy watchdog, Meta, is the most recent example of how regional authorities are growing more active in their enforcement of the bloc's privacy regulations against major internet corporations.
Insiders discovered the exposed data, which contained the full names, contact information, addresses, and dates of birth of users on the platform between 2018 and 2019. At the time, Meta said that the information was taken by a malicious party using a flaw that the firm addressed in 2019 and that it was the same information used in a prior leak that Motherboard had discovered in January 2021.
The DPC has fined Meta three times already this year. In connection with a slew of 2018 data breaches that compromised the personal information of as many as 30 million Facebook users, the DPC penalized Meta $18.6 million USD in March for poor record-keeping.
In a privacy issue, Meta and its affiliates, including WhatsApp and Instagram, have now been punished by Ireland three times in the last 15 months, reaching more than $900 million in monetary penalties. The other concerns include WhatsApp's transparency on how it manages user data and Instagram's management of children's data. Meta is contesting those judgments.
A representative for Meta stated that the business will reconsider the choice. Meta representative remarked, "Unauthorized data scraping is unacceptable and against our standards.
According to Ireland's privacy regulator, there are dozens more complaints involving numerous major tech corporations that are still pending. Based on the corporations and EU officials, tech companies are currently in discussions with the European Commission, the EU's executive body, to identify which parts of each new law will apply to the particular services they provide. Beginning in the middle of next year, certain parts of the new laws will be put into effect.
