he leading data privacy regulator for Meta platforms in the European Union gave a social media fine for the giant of about 251 million euros, which is equivalent
to $263.5 million. The Meta EU fine comes after a security breach that happened in 2018 which affected about 29 million Facebook users.
It’s true that at the time, Meta had informed the Commission of Data Protection about the cyber attack which took advantage of a vulnerability in Facebook code and attacked the “View As” social media feature. This Facebook feature had the role of allowing users to see what their own profile looked like to other friends and users.
But, according to DPC, the cyber attack caused a breach in all personal users' data such as full name, contact details, and place of work along with other children’s personal data.
"By allowing unauthorised exposure of profile information, the vulnerabilities behind this breach caused a grave risk of misuse of these types of data,", Graham Doyle, the DPC Deputy Commissioner stated.
It should be mentioned that the Meta social media giant fixed the breach very quickly after finding out about the cyberattack. It seems that out of the 29 million users of Facebook that were affected worldwide by the cyber attack, only 3 million were located in the European Union and in the European Economic Area.
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Why is the DPC the EU regulator? As some of you wondered, the DPC corresponds to the EU regulator for the various U.S. internet firms due to the fact that their operations are located in Ireland, and its role is to analyze all the EU privacy risks and penalize all the tech giants who are going against the privacy rules.
Up until now, the DPC has given a social media fine for Meta of about 3 billion euros for various violations of the GDPR ( General Data Protection Regulation), which was first introduced in 2018. Also, DPC is currently disputing a Meta fine of about 1.2 billion euros as a result of other Meta privacy violations.
According to Meta social media giant, the company plans to appeal the recent decision since the the platforms have a lot of safety measures integrated in order to keep the user's data protected across all social media platforms.
"We took immediate action to fix the problem as soon as it was identified, and we proactively informed people impacted as well as the Irish Data Protection Commission,", a Meta spokesperson stated.
Stay tuned for more updates!
By
Adam Brown
•
December 18, 2024 8:00 AM
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