Meta was fined €265 million ($277 million) after failing to prevent the leak of half a billion Facebook users’ personal data, the third-biggest fine under EU’s GDPR data law.
The Irish Data Protection Commission levied the fine after the social-media platform failed to apply safeguards required under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
Last year, personal information on 533 million Facebook users leaked on the internet, including their phone numbers and email addresses.
The commission investigated Facebook Search, Facebook Messenger Contact Importer and Instagram Contact Importer tools, between May 2018 and September 2019.
“We made changes to our systems during the time in question, including removing the ability to scrape our features in this way using phone numbers.”
– Meta
