Meta hit with $275M GDPR penalty for Facebook data-scraping breach

Facebook's parent, Meta, has been hit with another hefty penalty by the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) for breaching European data protection law.

In the latest penalty against Meta for violating European privacy rules, the tech giant was fined roughly $275 million on Monday for a data leak discovered last year that led to the personal information of more than 500 million Facebook users being published online.

The data was found on a website for hackers and included names, Facebook IDs, phone numbers, locations, birthdates, and email addresses of people from more than 100 countries, according to the reports.

At the time, Facebook tried to play down the breach - claiming the data that had been found floating around online was "old data" and that it had fixed the issue that led to the personal data being exposed.Then the company said the data had been "scraped" from Facebook using tools designed to help people find their friends through phone numbers using search and contact import features. The DPC said it investigated scraping between May 2018 and September 2019.

This is the second fine levied by the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) in just the past few months, following a €405 million ($402 million at the time) penalty issued in September. In just the last 18 months, Meta has tallied nearly €1 billion in fines.

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