Ireland's Data Protection Commission (DPC), the EU's data privacy regulator, has fined Facebook parent Meta €251 million because of a 2018 security breach that impacted 29 million users.
The breach happened due to a flaw in Facebook's View As feature, which lets users see a public view of their profiles. The hackers stole Full names, contact details, locations, places of work, birthdates, religion, gender, and more, including personal data for minor profiles.
The DPC said Meta fixed the flaw after discovering it, and about 3 million impacted users were from the EU. The DPC fined Meta €1.2 billion in 2023 over Facebook breaching GDPR directives on transferring user data from EU to US servers.
"Facebook profiles can, and often do, contain information about matters such as religious or political beliefs, sexual life or orientation, and similar matters that a user may wish to disclose only in particular circumstances," said DPC Deputy Commissioner Graham Doyle in a press statement.
"By allowing unauthorised exposure of profile information, the vulnerabilities behind this breach caused a grave risk of misuse of these types of data," Doyle added.
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Irish Data Protection Commission
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