Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC) has slapped Meta with a €265m fine after details of over half a billion users were leaked on a hacking page.
According to Security Week, the DPC said it had reached the decision following a comprehensive inquiry process, including cooperation with all of the other data protection supervisory authorities within the EU.
Meta’s European operations are based in Dublin, alongside a number of other major global tech companies including Google, Apple and Twitter. Due to this, Ireland’s data protection agency is the lead regulator responsible for holding them to account.
The DPC found that Meta had breached two articles of the EU’s data protection laws. The DPC said it had imposed a reprimand and an order, requiring the Facebook owner to bring its processing into compliance by taking a range of specified remedial actions within a particular timeframe.
A Meta spokesperson said the firm had ‘cooperated fully’ with the DPC on the issue. The company had previously claimed the data was ‘scraped’ from the site by hackers in 2019.
The spokesperson added, “We made changes to our systems during the time in question, including removing the ability to scrape our features in this way using phone numbers,” the spokesperson said.
“Unauthorized data scraping is unacceptable and against our rules and we will continue working with our peers on this industry challenge. We are reviewing this decision carefully.”
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