Security News > 2022 > November > Irish Regulator Fines Facebook $277 Million for Leak of Half a Billion Users' Data

Ireland's Data Protection Commission has levied fines of €265 million against Meta Platforms for failing to safeguard the personal data of more than half a billion users of its Facebook service, ramping up privacy enforcement against U.S. tech firms.

The fines follow an inquiry initiated by the European regulator on April 14, 2021, close on the heels of a leak of a "Collated dataset of Facebook personal data that had been made available on the internet."

The Irish watchdog, besides imposing a monetary penalty, also ordered Meta's Irish unit to make sure its processing complies with the E.U. data protection laws.

To counter such unauthorized data harvesting, the social media giant, late last year, expanded its bug bounty program to reward valid reports of scraping vulnerabilities across its platforms as well as include reports of scraping datasets that are available online.

Then earlier this March, the DPC followed it by issuing fines of €17 million for a number of security issues that led to 12 different data breach notifications between June 7 and December 4, 2018, and exposed the information of up to 30 million Facebook users.

Meta's Instagam was similarly fined €405 million in September 2022 for violating the E.U. General Data Protection Regulation over mishandling children's data online by making public the phone numbers and email addresses of those operating business accounts.

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