Meta has to answer for gigantic data leak
The Irish Data Protection Commission has fined Facebook parent company Meta in the amount of 265 million euros. The company has to answer for a leak from 2021. At that time, hackers had published the data of over 533 million Facebook users.
Facebook parent company Meta has to pay a fine of 265 million euros. That comes from one decision by the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC). The company has to answer for a data leak from 2021.
At that time, cybercriminals had published the data of around 533 million Facebook users. Telephone numbers, e-mail addresses, dates of birth and location information, among other things, circulated in a hacker forum. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is also said to have been affected.
Meta: Facebook parent company violated GDPR
The IT security company Hudson Rocket became aware of the data set in April 2021. According to Alon Gal, the company’s technical director, this is information that hackers had already captured in 2019.
The DPC then launched an investigation. The data protection authority has now announced that the investigation has been completed. The result: a violation of Article 25 paragraphs 1 and 2 of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Accordingly, Meta did not apply certain security precautions, which are required according to the GDPR.
Because of a data leak on Facebook: 265 million euros fine
Meta is now to pay a fine of 265 million euros for this. The investigation by the DPC referred to the meta tools Facebook Search, Facebook Messenger Contact Importer and Instagram Contact Importer.
The data protection authorities of the other EU members in turn supported the investigation and agreed with the decision of the Irish Data Protection Commission. It’s also not the first time the DPC meta has faced a horrendous penalty.
In September 2021, for example, the subsidiary WhatsApp had to pay 225 million euros due to data protection violations. At the beginning of 2022, the authority again imposed a fine of 17 million euros on Meta. Subsidiary Instagram was recently ordered to pay 405 million euros.
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