Meta, the owner of Facebook, has been fined almost €3 billion (about RM14 billion) by the European Union’s (EU) Data Protection Commission (DPC), including a record €1.2 billion fine in 2023 that Meta is appealing, reported Reuters on Dec 17. [€1=RM4.6769]
The Ireland-based DPC has so far fined Meta almost €3 billion based on the bloc’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) legal framework introduced in 2018. DPC is the lead EU regulator handling cases involving most of the top US internet firms due to the location of its operations in Ireland.
On Tuesday, in the latest ruling of data breach, Meta was fined €251 million (about RM1.2 billion) for a 2018 security breach that affected 29 million users of the social media platform globally, of which about 3 million were from the EU and the European Economic Area.
As reported, Meta notified Ireland’s DPC at the time that cyber attackers had exploited a vulnerability in Facebook’s code that impacted the “View As” feature used to generate a preview of the users’ own profile. The vulnerability of the code caused the leak of personal data including full name, contact details, location, place of work, date of birth, religion, gender and their children’s personal data, said the
“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 spokesperson for Meta said in a statement.
