Meta Faces Massive Fine for Privacy Violation
By Movieguide® Contributor
Meta is facing a privacy penalty in Europe.
The social media giant owes $101.5 million to Ireland’s Data Protection Commission for neglecting to protect the privacy and passwords of users in a 2019 data breach.
TechCrunch reported, “The DPC opened a statutory inquiry into the incident in question in April 2019 under the bloc’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) after Meta, or Facebook as the company was still called back then, notified it that ‘hundreds of millions’ of users’ passwords had been stored in plaintext on its servers.”
According to the law, Meta was required to announce the data breach within 72 hours of its discovery and failed to do so.
“It is widely accepted that user passwords should not be stored in plaintext, considering the risks of abuse that arise from persons accessing such data,” Deputy Commissioner Graham Doyle said of the situation. “It must be borne in mind, that the passwords the subject of consideration in this case, are particularly sensitive, as they would enable access to users’ social media accounts.”
Meta spokesperson Matthew Pollard responded, “As part of a security review in 2019, we found that a subset of FB [Facebook] users’ passwords were temporarily logged in a readable format within our internal data systems. We took immediate action to fix this error, and there is no evidence that these passwords were abused or accessed improperly. We proactively flagged this issue to our lead regulator, the Irish Data Protection Commission, and have engaged constructively with them throughout this inquiry.”
This isn’t the first time Meta has gotten in trouble for failed privacy features. In 2023, the company was fined 1.3 billion by the European Union for “transferring Facebook users’ data to US servers.” In 2021, the company owed $887 million to Amazon “in relation to personalized advertising.”
Movieguide® previously reported on Meta:
Meta is launching a sweeping update to its AI service that adds impressive features such as the automatic editing of photos and the ability to have an out loud conversation with the chatbot.
The new features also include the ability to show the AI a picture and have it identify things in the photo, like the type of bird or plant, and to converse with celebrities, including John Cena, Awkwafina and Kristen Bell. Another feature is automatically translating and dubbing posts in a variety of different languages.
Business owners who use WhatsApp will also find new features, including the ability to have AI automatically respond to customers who reach out using the platform.
“Meta AI differentiates itself in this category by not just offering state-of-the-art AI models, but also unlimited access to those models for free, integrated easily into our different products and apps,” said Meta’s Founder, Mark Zuckerberg. “So Meta AI is on track to being the most used AI assistant in the world by the end of this year. In fact, it’s probably already there. … We’re almost at 500 million monthly activities, and we haven’t even launched in some of the bigger countries yet.”
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