Meta sanctioned with €265m over data scraping practices

 The Irish Data Protection Commissioner levied a €265 million fine on Monday (28 November) on Meta-owned Facebook and Instagram over their data scraping practices and ordered a set of remedial actions.

The inquiry spurs from massive data leaks of Facebook personal data dumped online in a hacker forum in April 2021, which included sensitive information such as full names, locations, birthdates, phone numbers and email addresses.

The data leak concerned 533 million people in 106 countries – in the EU, around 86 million people were affected. At the time, Facebook said that the leaked data was old since the mass data scraping occurred because of a vulnerability that the company had patched in August 2019.

As most Big Tech companies have their European headquarters in Ireland, the Irish data protection authority is tasked with enforcing on them the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the EU’s privacy rulebook. (...)