On December 17, the Irish Data Protection Commission fined the company that owns Facebook and other digital assets Meta €251 million for failing to comply with the EU's data privacy regulation (the so-called GDPR).
On December 17, the Irish Data Protection Commission fined the company that owns Facebook and other digital assets Meta €251 million for failing to comply with the EU's data privacy regulation (the so-called GDPR).
According to euractiv, the fine was imposed for a security breach on the social network Facebook, which took place in July 2017 and affected about 3 million accounts in the eurozone.
“This enforcement action highlights how failure to comply with data protection requirements can put people’s fundamental rights and freedoms at risk,” said Graham Doyle, deputy head of the Irish authority.
The reason for this was a bug in Facebook's design that allowed unauthorized Facebook users to view the private profiles of other users.
Mark Zuckerberg's company is expected to appeal the decision. "We have taken immediate steps to resolve the issue," a Meta spokesperson said in an email.
According to him, Meta discovered this security issue in September 2018, fixed the vulnerability, and reported it to regulatory authorities.
However, the Irish regulator believes that Meta did not fully document the breach and did not report it to regulators properly.
Previously, dev.ua wrote that the European Union fined Meta almost 800 million euros for violating antitrust laws, which European regulatory authorities see as the fact that Facebook users received automatic access to the Facebook Marketplace ad service.
Before that, the Irish Data Protection Commission had already fined Meta $101.5 million (€91 million) after completing an investigation into a security breach in 2019. At that time, it was revealed that the company had mistakenly stored users' passwords in an insecure format.
