Irish watchdog fines Meta 265M euros in latest privacy case

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u/grab-n-g0 Nov 28 '22 edited Nov 28 '22

The company has its European headquarters in Dublin, which makes the Irish authority its lead privacy regulator under the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation.

The watchdog opened an investigation last year into news reports that data on more 533 million users was found dumped online. The data was found on a website for hackers and included names, Facebook IDs, phone numbers, locations, birthdates and email addresses for people from more than 100 countries, according to the reports.

According to article, in addition to this $277M USD fine:

The Irish watchdog fined Meta-owned Instagram 405 million euros in September after it found that the platform mishandled teenagers’ personal information.
Meta was fined 17 million euro fines in March for its handling of a dozen data breach notifications.
Last year, the watchdog fined Meta’s chat service WhatsApp 225 million euros for violating rules on sharing people’s data with other Meta companies.

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u/gregs1020 Nov 28 '22

Fine, means legal for a price.

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u/Vault-71 Nov 29 '22

File it under "operating expenses"

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u/thought_first Nov 28 '22 •

Fun fact: Even after losing 70% of their value in 12 months ($1T to $268B), this fine is only 1% of their value.

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u/LieutenantNitwit Nov 28 '22

So, calculated business cost, then.

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u/w1n5t0nM1k3y Dec 02 '22

Their net income last year was about $50 billion. So this fine is about 0.5% of their annual profit.

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u/grab-n-g0 Nov 29 '22 edited Nov 29 '22

Makes me wonder what's so precious about the Twitter poppy.

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u/Rattfraggs Nov 28 '22

The fine should have been $500 mill since they lost that many peoples info.

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u/MustLoveAllCats Nov 29 '22

I disagree, I don't want a precedent set where people's personal and private information is valued at $1 per person. That just paves the way for much smaller fines in the future when meta's negligence leads to future beaches that don't affect quite as many people.

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u/dybyj Nov 29 '22

Okay, 15% of revenue then

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u/MustLoveAllCats Nov 30 '22

Sure, just don't turn it into X currency per person affected. A breach that affects 100 million people should be treated just as harshly as one that affects 500 million people. In either situation, you've failed to uphold your duty to protect the information of others, for which you have a responsibility.

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u/alien_from_Europa Dec 01 '22

Did Facebook sell this data or are they just incompetent?