Ireland’s data privacy regulator imposed a $277 million superb on social media giant Facebook on Monday, bringing the full it has fined parent group Meta to about $1.04 billion.
The penalty resulted from an investigation, began last yr into the invention of a collated set of private data that had been scraped from Facebook between May 2018 and September 2019, and made available online.
Facebook was also ordered to make a spread of corrective measures.
Meta said it had cooperated fully with the investigation by Ireland’s Data Privacy Commissioner and made changes to its systems in the course of the time in query, including removing the power to scrape its features in this fashion using phone numbers.
Monday’s superb is the fourth the DPC has levied against considered one of Meta’s firms. It’s Meta’s lead privacy regulator inside the European Union, and has 13 more inquiries into the social media group.
In September, the watchdog hit its Instagram subsidiary with a record superb of $420 million, which Meta plans to appeal. Meta added in its statement on Monday that it was reviewing the choice related to the most recent superb.
The DPC regulates Apple, Google, Twitter, Tiktok and other technology giants as a result of the placement of their EU headquarters in Ireland. It currently has 40 inquiries open into such firms.
The regulator has the ability to impose fines of as much as 4% of an organization’s global revenue under the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation’s “One Stop Shop” regime introduced in 2018.
The DPC said mitigating aspects in Monday’s decision – which had been approved by all other relevant EU regulators – included the actions Facebook had taken.
“We’ll keep going until the behavior does change,” Ireland’s Data Privacy Commissioner Helen Dixon told Irish national broadcaster RTE on Monday.
Meta shares were down nearly 2% on Monday.