Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, has been fined €265 million by Ireland’s data security regulator. The Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) has announced Monday. According to the DPC, Meta has exceeded European data security rules.
In 2021, a database was placed on an online hacker platform containing the data of approximately 533 million users of Meta services. Among other things, their full names, telephone numbers, places of residence and dates of birth were publicly visible. The DPC then launched an investigation, because Meta’s European headquarters is located in Ireland and it must therefore comply with EU regulations.
This year, the DPC has already fined Meta twice before. In March it was 17.9 million euros for not reporting data breaches from 2018 and in September a record fine of more than 387 million euros because Instagram had not adequately protected the data of teenagers.
Other large tech companies from the US have recently also had to deal with fines of millions from European regulators. For example, last year Amazon was fined 750 million euros by the regulator in Luxembourg for its handling of user privacy, and Google was fined in France earlier this year for collecting data from YouTube users.