Facebook owner Meta is facing substantial €265m (£230m) fine by the Irish data watchdog after a major data breach.

The breach resulted in in the personal details of more than 500 million of the social media’s firms’ users being published online.

Ireland’s data protection commission (DPC) released a statement on Facebook’s “Data Scraping” inquiry, stating that it was imposing €265m fine and a “range of corrective measures”.

The DPC said Meta had infringed two articles of the EU’s data protection laws after details of global Facebook users were scraped from public profiles in 2018 and 2019.

Issues stem from reports that a hacking website had released the details last year, prompting an investigation. The watchdog said a “significant” number of the users were from the EU.

Ireland’s DPC initially launched its inquiry on April 14^th, 2021, after discovery of the Facebook dataset had been made available online.

The DPC questioned Meta’s compliance with GDPR rules for Data Protection by Design and Default, the watchdog noted in a its statement.

A “reprimand” will be imposed as well as an order requiring Meta “to bring its processing into compliance” and take a range of actions within a timeframe, as well as the fine.

This latest fine and breach of rules will bring the total amount fines imposed on Meta by the DPC to nearly €1bn since September last year.

Back in March this year, the social media firm was handed a substantial €17 million (£14.2m) for breaching EU data privacy laws.

The Irish DPC, which is responsible for regulating Meta across the EU, said the firm had broken GDPR laws by not having in place “appropriate technical and organisational measures” to protect user data.

Recommended

• Winners announced at 2022 Scottish Cyber Awards
• Dumfries tech firm partners with local school to address digital skills gap
• New broadband project to boost connectivity in the Scottish Highlands

The Meta GDPR breach came after a lengthy inquiry into 12 data breaches received by the DPC between 7 June and 4 December, 2018.

Facebook has also been embroiled in controversy in the US due to the Cambridge Analytica scandal, after a year-long investigation into privacy violations.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) ruled that Facebook will pay $5 billion for “deceiving” users about their ability to keep their personal information private.

In addition, the company was ordered to set up an independent privacy committee that would have no influence or control from Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg.

Erfan Shadabi, cybersecurity expert at comforte AG, commented: “Millions of Euros in fines have been issued to violators of GDPR. Enterprises spend many millions (billions?) more attempting to comply with GDPR through procedural refinements, compliance monitoring, and tool acquisition.

“The fact that GDPR codifies data protection standards and associated fines for non-compliance means that more and more enterprises are doing their best to handle, process, and store peoples’ data more safely. As in the case Meta, the Irish Data Protection Commission found that Meta was in breach of Article 25 of General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) rules.

“In addition to the punishment, Meta has also received a reprimand and an order directing it to bring its processing into compliance by taking a number of certain corrective actions within a certain amount of time.”

Shadabi added: “Consumers put their faith and trust in enterprises to observe data security and privacy mandates as spelt out by GDPR, and other measures. When organisations fail to do that, customers take notice and subsequently seek out alternative organisations that can better protect them and their sensitive information.

“How can organisations avoid this far worse fate of damaged reputation? They need to take a data-centric approach to protect their customers’ private, sensitive data through methods such as tokenisation, which is quickly becoming the norm in enterprises seeking to go beyond bare-minimum compliance requirements.”

Get the latest news from DIGIT direct to your inbox

Our newsletter covers the latest technology and IT news from Scotland and beyond, as well as in-depth features and exclusive interviews with leading figures and rising stars.

To subscribe, click here.