Monday, Ireland’s data privacy authorities penalized social networking giant Facebook $277 million, raising its total fines against parent company Meta to almost $1.04 billion.
The penalty is the outcome of an investigation begun last year into the finding of a compiled collection of personal data scraped from Facebook between May 2018 and September 2019 and made available online.
Facebook was also required to take numerous corrective actions.
Meta stated that it had fully cooperated with Ireland’s Data Privacy Commissioner’s investigation and made adjustments to its systems over the relevant time period, including removing the ability to scrape its features using phone numbers.
This is the fourth time that the DPC has fined one of Meta’s enterprises. It is the primary privacy authority for Meta within the European Union, with 13 other enquiries into the social networking company.
In September, Instagram’s parent company, Meta, was slammed with a record-setting $420 million fine by the watchdog. Meta plans to appeal.
Meta noted in its Monday statement that it was examining the most recent fine’s decision.
Due to the location of their EU headquarters in Ireland, Apple, Google, Twitter, Tiktok, and other technological companies are regulated by the DPC. It now has forty open inquiries into such companies.
Under the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation’s “One Stop Shop” regime, which was established in 2018, the regulator may issue fines of up to 4% of a company’s global revenue.
The DPC stated that Facebook’s measures were mitigating considerations in Monday’s judgment, which was endorsed by all other relevant EU regulators.
Monday, Ireland’s Data Privacy Commissioner Helen Dixon told Irish national television RTE, “We will persist until the behavior changes.”
Monday saw a decline of over 2% in Meta shares.
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