Meta fined €805 million in Italy
By the AFREEQUE newsroom, based on L’essentiel, SeneNews and P.M. News
Illustrative image · Julio Lopez · Pexels · Licence PexelsMeta must pay a €805 million fine in Italy, the Italian data protection authority has announced, according to L’essentiel. The regulator considers that the group accessed Android users' photos without their specific consent, via the Facebook app. It is one of the largest penalties ever imposed on a digital giant in the country.
According to the Italian data protection authority, the feature in question, titled "Get suggestions from the gallery", has existed since 2023: while users browse, it proposes photos and videos stored on the phone as ideas for posts. The regulator judged that a single authorisation, accompanied by a general message, did not make clear that it covered this feature. Meta must now obtain a separate consent, detail how the feature is used, state that it requires access to the gallery and explain how to turn it off. According to P.M. News, the group has 60 days to switch it off by default.
To set the amount, the authority took into account the large number of people concerned, around 20 million Android users in Italy. It also cited the continuation of the practice for users who had not updated the app or had already given their consent, as well as Meta’s limited cooperation during the investigation. This corresponds to about 0.4% of the group’s annual revenue.
For context, Amazon was fined more than €1.1 billion in 2021 for anticompetitive practices, an amount reduced to €752 million after appeal. Meta can contest the decision, and the group had not yet responded by the afternoon of Saturday.
The group also faces other convictions: three days earlier, it was sanctioned in Brazil for unequal treatment of Lula, and at the end of October it was ordered to pay $25 billion to New Mexico, for having misled the state’s residents about their data over more than ten years. This is a record for the group.
