Facebook parent Meta has been fined 17 million euros by the European Union for failing to prevent a series of data breaches on Facebook’s platform in 2018, violating EU privacy rules. The Irish Data Protection Commission, Meta's lead privacy watchdog in the European Union, said it found Facebook "failed to take appropriate technical and organisational measures".
In 2018, Facebook became the first major test after the EU's General Data Protection Regulation was enacted. At the time, Irish regulators announced an investigation into a breach affecting as many as 50 million accounts.
The investigation related to the March 15 penalty began in December of that year over 12 bug notifications from Facebook, some of which were caused by a software bug that led to outside developers gaining access to millions of users. Photo.