Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta company has just been fined with a €251 million in Europe over a personal data breach that occurred in 2018 and affected 29 million Facebook users globally.
The fine was announced on Tuesday by the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC), confirming Meta Platforms Ireland Limited (‘MPIL’) reported the breach in September 2018.
The categories of personal data affected included: user’s full name; email address; phone number; location; place of work; date of birth; religion; gender; posts on timelines; groups of which a user was a member; and children’s personal data.
According to reports, the breach occurred between September 14 and September 18, 2018, where hackers found this gap in Facebook’s security and exploited it to log into users account.
DPC released a statement which reads, “The decisions, which were made by the Commissioners for Data Protection, Dr. Des Hogan and Dale Sunderland, included a number of reprimands and an order to pay administrative fines totalling €251 million.”
However, DPC found Meta to be in breach of Article 33(3) of the GDPR and further fined Meta for this breach and lack of disclosing full information of the Facebook security hack.
The commission stated, “The DPC reprimanded MPIL for failures in regards to this provision and ordered it to pay administrative fines of €8 million.
“By failing to document the facts relating to each breach, the steps taken to remedy them, and to do so in a way that allows the Supervisory Authority to verify compliance.
“The DPC reprimanded MPIL for failures in regards to this provision and ordered it to pay administrative fines of €3 million.”
DPC also found Meta guilty of going against Article 25(1) and Article 25(2) of the GDPR and further fined the social media company administrative fines of €130 million and €110 million, respectively.
This year seems to be a year of several fines against Meta.
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