Meta fined $276 million over Fb knowledge leak involving greater than 533 million customers
The leaked info, noticed by Insider, was posted to an internet hacking discussion board and included the total names, cellphone numbers, places, and birthdates of customers on the platform from 2018 to 2019. On the time, Meta mentioned the unhealthy actor obtained the knowledge by a vulnerability that the corporate fastened in 2019 and that this was the identical info concerned in a previous leak reported by Motherboard in January 2021.
This marks the third positive the DPC imposed on Meta this 12 months. In March, the DPC fined Meta $18.6 million USD for unhealthy record-keeping in relation to a sequence of 2018 knowledge breaches that uncovered the knowledge of as much as 30 million Fb customers. The European regulator additionally slapped Meta with a $402 million positive in September following an investigation into Instagram’s dealing with of youngsters’ knowledge.
Meta has been fined almost $700 million by the DPC in 2022 — and that doesn’t embody the $267 million positive WhatsApp incurred for violating Europe’s knowledge privateness legal guidelines final 12 months. In a press release obtained by Newstalk reporter Jess Kelly, an unidentified Meta spokesperson mentioned:
We made adjustments to our methods in the course of the time in query, together with eradicating the power to scrape our options on this approach utilizing cellphone numbers. Unauthorised knowledge scraping is unacceptable and in opposition to our guidelines and we are going to proceed working with our friends on this business problem. We’re reviewing this resolution rigorously.
Meta didn’t instantly reply to The Verge’s request for remark. The corporate highlighted what it does to fight knowledge scraping in a weblog submit from final 12 months, noting that it duties its Exterior Information Misuse (EDM) staff with detecting, blocking, and stopping scraping.
