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Instagram Hit with €405m Fine over Handling of Children’s Privacy
The fine is the largest imposed on Meta by Irish data protection authorities.
Ireland’s Data Protection Commissioner (DPC) has issued Instagram with a €405 million fine for violating children’s privacy.
The fine follows a two-year investigation into claims that child users were able to operate business accounts on the social media platform.
By using business accounts, information pertaining to child users – such as phone numbers or email addresses – was visible to the public.
Accounts belonging to young users were also made public by default, according to complaints.
Commenting on the fine, a spokesperson for the DPC said: “We adopted our final decision last Friday and it does contain a fine of 405 million euros.”
Instagram’s parent company, Meta, said it plans to appeal the decision. In a statement to BBC News, the social media giant claimed that public-by-default settings were updated more than a year ago.
A spokesperson said: “This inquiry focused on old settings that we updated over a year ago and we’ve since released many new features to help keep teens safe and their information private.
“Anyone under 18 automatically has their account set to private when they join Instagram, so only people they know can see what they post and adults can’t message teens who don’t follow them.
“While we’ve engaged fully with the DPC throughout their inquiry, we disagree with how this fine was calculated and intend to appeal it.”
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The fine marks the largest issued to Meta by Irish authorities, surpassing a €225 million fine issued against WhatsApp last year.
The investigation found that the messaging platform failed to inform EU citizens about data collection practices and how the firm shared data with its parent company.
In the wake of the investigation, WhatsApp was ordered to change its privacy policies.
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