Irish data regulator on Monday fined Facebook‘s parent company, Meta, with a $277 million fine after private data of more than half a billion users were leaked, violating European Union data protection rules.
Meta fined for the abuse of the “scrapping” feature on Facebook
The penalty comes after a year-long investigation started in April last year. Between 2018 and 2019, the private data of Facebook users, including names, IDs, phone numbers, email addresses, birth dates and locations, were published on a hacking website. It was reported that around 557 million users were affected across 100 different countries.
The Data Protection Commission of Ireland ordered Meta, the parent company of Meta, to enforce a “range of preventive measures to stop any such hack to happen again. Although the company says that it patched the vulnerability in 2019, soon after, reports of a data breach emerged.
We “cooperated fully” with the data commissioner, says Meta
Meta said it had cooperated completely with the investigation by Ireland’s watchdog, implementing changes to its systems, including removing the ability to scrape users using phone numbers.
As per the company, the bad actors “scrapped” the data using tools designed for users to help find their friends using phone numbers. Now, the feature has been removed, and Meta added that “unauthorized data scraping is unacceptable and against our rules.”
Irish watchdog has fined Meta a total of 1 billion euros since last year
It is the fourth time that the Irish watchdog has fined Meta, putting a total penalty of 1 billion euros. Earlier this year, in September, the Ireland regulator hit Instagram with a fine of 405 million euros, and a 225 million euros penalty was put on WhatsApp for infringing rules on sharing user data.
Meta fined for the abuse of the “scrapping” feature on Facebook
The penalty comes after a year-long investigation started in April last year. Between 2018 and 2019, the private data of Facebook users, including names, IDs, phone numbers, email addresses, birth dates and locations, were published on a hacking website. It was reported that around 557 million users were affected across 100 different countries.
The Data Protection Commission of Ireland ordered Meta, the parent company of Meta, to enforce a “range of preventive measures to stop any such hack to happen again. Although the company says that it patched the vulnerability in 2019, soon after, reports of a data breach emerged.
We “cooperated fully” with the data commissioner, says Meta
Meta said it had cooperated completely with the investigation by Ireland’s watchdog, implementing changes to its systems, including removing the ability to scrape users using phone numbers.
As per the company, the bad actors “scrapped” the data using tools designed for users to help find their friends using phone numbers. Now, the feature has been removed, and Meta added that “unauthorized data scraping is unacceptable and against our rules.”
Irish watchdog has fined Meta a total of 1 billion euros since last year
It is the fourth time that the Irish watchdog has fined Meta, putting a total penalty of 1 billion euros. Earlier this year, in September, the Ireland regulator hit Instagram with a fine of 405 million euros, and a 225 million euros penalty was put on WhatsApp for infringing rules on sharing user data.