South Korea Slaps Meta with $15 Million for Illegally Collecting Facebook User Data

• After a 4-year investigation, South Korea's watchdog imposed a $15 million fine on Meta.
• The company was accused of illegally collecting information on 980,000 Facebook users, including private details such as their religious and political beliefs and sexual orientation.
• Meta's South Korean office has addressed the decision and said that it would carefully review" it.

On Tuesday, Meta was fined by the South Korean privacy watchdog for illegally collecting the personal information of 980,000 Facebook users without their consent.

It was basically tracking user activity, checking which posts or pages they liked or what ads they clicked on to understand their likes and dislikes.

The data collection started sometime in July 2018 and went on until March 2022.

The information ranged from their religious and political views to their sexual orientation. Not just that, this information was then shared with over 4,000 advertisers. And the worst part is, users had no idea that their data was being shared.

Every company collects data from its users. However, they have to be transparent about it and disclose it through their privacy policy. However, Facebook only vaguely mentions its data collection practices, leaving most users unaware of the real situation.

The problem doesn't end here. The company was also accused of risking user privacy by failing to implement basic security measures.

• For starters, it didn't remove inactive pages so hackers used them to forge identities and send password reset requests for other Facebook users.
• Meta then approved these password reset requests without verification, leading to at least 10 users suffering from data breaches.

Hence, after a 4-year investigation led by Lee Eun Jung (a director of the Commission), the Personal Information Protection Commission imposed a fine of 21.6 billion won ($15 million).

Meta didn't say much about the decision. Its South Korean office simply said that it would carefully review" the commission's decision.

Previous Fines Imposed on Meta by the Commission

This isn't the first time that Meta has gotten into trouble with the Personal Information Protection Commission.

• In 2020, it was fined 6.7 billion won ($4.8 million) for doing something similar. Back when it was still Facebook, it was selling the personal information of its users to third parties.
• Similarly in 2022, Google and Meta were fined a combined amount of 100 billion won ($72 million) for tracking the online behavior of its users without their consent. And once again, this data was sold to advertisers.

This is the biggest ever fine imposed on any company for privacy violation in South Korea. This time too, the Commission accused the companies of not being transparent with its users.

It said even if they want to engage in such tracking and data collection practices, they need to inform their users and obtain clear consent.

Meta's Poor Handling of User Data

South Korea isn't the only country that has imposed fines on Meta for its poor data handling. Norwegian regulator Datatilsynet imposed a $100K daily fine on Meta in July 2023 for illegally harvesting physical locations and other data such as location, interests, and browsing habits without users' consent.

Meta also had to make a $1.4 billion settlement in the Texas facial recognition lawsuit, where the company was accused of scanning and studying Facebook users' faces through its tag' feature, without any consent.

By these series of events, it is quite clear that user consent' is only practiced on paper by the social media giant. Unless it is pulled up by a regulator, the company doesn't seem to care about how it handles users' data.

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