Meta fined $414 million in latest privacy crackdown in Europe

Euro­pean Union reg­u­la­tors on Tues­day fined Face­book par­ent com­pa­ny Meta hun­dreds of mil­lions of dol­lars for breach­es of pri­va­cy that allowed the com­pa­ny to per­son­al­ize users in 27 coun­tries based on their online activ­i­ty. Pro­hib­it­ed to force peo­ple to accept ads.

Ire­land’s Data Pro­tec­tion Com­mis­sion has announced a total of €390 mil­lion ($414 mil­lion) in two cas­es that could under­mine Meta’s busi­ness mod­el of serv­ing ads based on users’ online behav­ior. ) to impose fines. The com­pa­ny says it will appeal.

Judg­ment in the third case involv­ing Meta’s What­sApp mes­sag­ing ser­vice is expect­ed lat­er this month.

Meta and oth­er tech giants are under pres­sure from the Euro­pean Union’s pri­va­cy reg­u­la­tions, which are said to be among the tough­est in the world. Irish reg­u­la­tors have fined four oth­er Meta cas­es total­ing more than €900 mil­lion for data pri­va­cy breach­es beyond 2021, along with a num­ber of oth­er pend­ing fines against var­i­ous Sil­i­con Val­ley com­pa­nies. I have a case to resolve.

Meta also faces reg­u­la­to­ry headaches as EU antitrust author­i­ties in Brus­sels wield pow­er against tech com­pa­nies. Last month, they accused Meta of dis­tort­ing com­pe­ti­tion in clas­si­fied advertising.

The Irish Super­vi­so­ry Author­i­ty, with its region­al head­quar­ters in Dublin, is the main reg­u­la­tor of Meta’s Euro­pean data pri­va­cy reg­u­la­tions, with €210 mil­lion for breach­es of EU data pri­va­cy rules on Face­book and anoth­er €1 for breach­es on Insta­gram. fined €80 million.

The deci­sion stems from com­plaints filed in May 2018, when a 27-coun­try block pri­va­cy reg­u­la­tion called the Gen­er­al Data Pro­tec­tion Reg­u­la­tion (GDPR) came into effect.

In the past, Meta has processed users’ per­son­al data to serve users with per­son­al­ized adver­tis­ing (behav­ioral adver­tis­ing) based on what they searched online, the web­sites they vis­it­ed, the videos they clicked on, etc. relied on obtain­ing informed con­sent from

With the enforce­ment of the GDPR, we are chang­ing the legal basis for pro­cess­ing user data by adding a clause to our adver­tis­ing terms of ser­vice, effec­tive­ly forc­ing users to con­sent to data usage. This vio­lates EU pri­va­cy regulations.