Meta gets a €265 million fine in Ireland for 2021 Facebook Data Breach

Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC) announced that it has imposed a fine of €265 million on Meta for the 2021 data breach. The data breach on Facebook exposed the phone numbers, locations, and birthdates of 533 million people who were Facebook users from 2018 to 2019.

Meta gets a €265 million fine in Ireland for 2021 Facebook Data Breach

On April 14, 2021, the DPC started its investigation into the matter, following media reports about the discovery of this dataset, which was being made available on the internet. However, the DPC found that Meta was in breach of Article 25 of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) rules.

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“Because this data set was so large because there had been previous instances of scraping on the platform, where the issues could have been identified in a more timely way, we ultimately imposed a significant sanction,” Data Protection Commissioner Helen Dixon said. “The risks are considerable for individuals in terms of scamming, spamming, smishing, phishing and loss of control over their personal data so we imposed a fine of €265m in total.”

As well as the fine, Meta has been issued with a reprimand and an order requiring it to bring its processing into compliance by taking a range of specified remedial actions within a particular timeframe. The comprehensive inquiry process involved cooperation with all of the other data protection supervisory authorities within the EU, which all agreed with the decision of the DPC

A spokesman for the company said: “Protecting the privacy and security of people’s data is fundamental to how our business works. That’s why we have cooperated fully with the Irish Data Protection Commission on this important issue.

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