By Jack Rogers

It’s not the first time Meta has been caught meddling with data! The Data Protection Commission in Ireland has recently announced its conclusion to an inquiry in the Facebook “Data Scraping” Inquiry opened in 2021. Data Scraping is the process through which data can be collected by external parties.

What happened in 2021? The Irish Data Protection Commission (‘DPC’) launched an inquiry on 14 April 2021 when the personal data of 533 million Facebook and Instagram users across 106 countries were published online on a hacking forum in 2019. The data included names, locations, and some email addresses. The inquiry concerned a tool designed to help users find friends and people they know by importing contacts from their phones onto the Facebook or Instagram App.

The material issues in this inquiry were:

• The processing of the data carried out by Meta Platforms Ireland Limited between May 2018 to September 2019.
• Whether the collation and processing of that data were compliant with the GDPR obligation for Data Protection by Design and Default – in particular Article 25 of the GDPR which examines the implementation of technical and organisational measures.

What was the verdict?

• On Friday 25 November 2022, the Irish DPC concluded that Meta violated Articles 25(1) and 25(2) of the GDPR.
  • Article 25(1) GDPR – the data controller shall at the time of determining the means for processing and at the time of processing implement appropriate measures to implement data protection principles to incorporate necessary safeguards and protect the rights of the data subjects.
• Article 25(2) GDPR – the data controller shall implement appropriate measures to ensure only personal data which is necessary is processed and collected. This applies to the amount of personal data collected, the extent of the processing, the period of data storage and accessibility.

Meta Platforms Ireland Limited was ordered to bring its processing into compliance by taking a range of remedial actions within a timeframe.

Fines totalling €265m were imposed on Meta Platforms Ireland Limited.

This latest sanction brings Meta’s aggregate fines to roughly €1 billion!