Like all companies, Meta must comply with the GDPR, the General Data Protection Regulation in Europe. Unfortunately, a condemnation has just fallen against the group of Mark Zuckerberg, the social network giant is accused of not having followed one of the articles of the GDPR. An investigation made it possible to lift the veil on non-compliance with the rules and a sanction quickly fell.
Meta is sentenced to 265 million euros
List of personal data convictions continues to grow for Meta as the company has a history catastrophic in this area, things are not getting better with yet another sanction. Indeed, the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) has just imposed a fine of 265 million euros to Mark Zuckerberg’s group.
The reason given is a breach of Article 25 which concerns the “data protection by design and data protection by default”. In April 2021, the DPC had opened an investigation against Meta, the Commission had discovered with surprise that a database containing personal information on 533 million Facebook accounts was freely available on the internet. We found in this list more than 20 million profiles belonging to French people.
Meta had quickly been warned by European regulators to bring the fixes needed to this massive flaw. In just a few days everything was done, but the problem was that the database had been accessible for many weeks. Today, the investigation finds that Meta has been negligent towards the personal data of its users and this deserves a significant financial penalty to prevent this from happening again in the future.
The main concern of the Irish Data Protection Commission is that data which should not be public such as: the email address, the date of birth, the telephone number, the first and last name or the Facebook identifier have been put online without the user being aware of or having control over the publication.
The last condemnation of the Meta group dates back only 3 months, it concerned (again) the management of personal data. As a reminder, the incident took place on Instagram where the social network had not been able to protect the privacy of teenagers on the platform. Behind this heavy condemnation, we also found the Irish Commission. Decidedly, the DPC no longer lets go of Meta and its various flaws in terms of personal data, it is the fourth time that Meta is sanctioned by this Commission.
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