There has been a lot of talk about this data leak for a long time. Since the data leak occurred two years ago. But only now, the Irish Data Protection Commission has fined Meta 265 million euros. That’s about $276 million.
The Data Protection Commission began investigating shortly after news broke of the leak of phone numbers, locations, and birth dates of Facebook users on the platform from 2018 to 2019. The April 2021 leak revealed information about more than 533 million users.
The case examined whether Facebook complied with European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) laws.
For its part, Meta argued that it was a hacker attack and that the data hit the network because an attacker got the information through a vulnerability, which the company fixed in 2019.
A Meta spokesman said the company was working to make changes to their systems, including removing the ability to verify features using phone numbers similarly. They also said they would work with colleagues on this industry problem.
This is the third penalty the DPC has imposed on Meta this year. The first fine this year was for poor record-keeping in connection with a series of data breaches in 2018 that exposed information about 30 million users.
Then a European regulator also fined Meta $402 million after investigating Instagram’s handling of teenagers’ data.
