Meta's New Year Kicks Off With Over $410 Million in Fresh EU Privacy Fines

Meta is kicking off the New Year with more privacy fines and corrective orders hitting its business in Europe. The latest swathe of enforcement relates to EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) complaints over the legal basis it claims to run behavioral ads. From a report: The Facebook owner's lead data protection watchdog in the region, the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC), announced today that it's adopted final decisions on two of these long-running enquiries -- against Meta owned social networking site, Facebook, and social photo sharing service, Instagram. The DPC's press release today announces financial penalties of ~$223 million for Facebook and ~$191 million for Instagram -- and confirms the European Data Protection Board (EDPB)'s binding decision last month on these complaints that contractual necessity is not an appropriate basis for processing personal data for behavioral ads. These new sanctions add to a pile of privacy fines for Meta in Europe last year -- including a $281 million penalty for a Facebook data-scraping breach; $429 million for an Instagram violation of children's privacy; $18 million for several historical Facebook data breaches; and a $63.6 million penalty over Facebook cookie consent violations -- making for a total of $792 million in (publicly disclosed) EU data protection and privacy fines handed down to the adtech giant in 2022. But now, in the first few days of 2023, Meta has landed financial penalties worth more than half last year's regional total -- and more sanctions could be coming shortly.

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