Expensive Meta day. First, Australia announced a $50 million AUD ($31.7 million USD) settlement with the company over the Cambridge Analytica scandal and now the Irish Data Protection Committee (IDPC) has fined Meta €251 million ($263 million). The IRDC fine stems from Facebook’s 2018 personal data breach.
The hackers exploited a “vulnerability in Facebook’s code,” related to the View As feature, the company said at the time. It allowed them to seize users’ access tokens and take over those accounts. Bad actors were able to access the Facebook accounts of 29 million users, including three million users in the European Union and the European Economic Area. They gained access to information such as full username, email address, phone number, location, date of birth, religion and personal data of the children.
IDPC holds Meta responsible for not having proper data security when designing its processing systems, not processing personal data only when necessary and not disclosing all information about the breach.
“This enforcement action highlights that failure to build in data protection requirements throughout the design and development cycle can expose people to serious risks and harms, including risks to fundamental rights and civil liberties,” said DPC Deputy Commissioner Graham Doyle. “By allowing the unauthorized disclosure of profile information, the vulnerability of this breach created a greater risk of misuse of these types of data.”
Below, the resolution of the Cambridge Analytica scandal comes from a nurse who revealed in 2018 that the company “exploited Facebook to harvest millions of people’s profiles.” Facebook had found out about it three years earlier. Cambridge Analytica took this information to influence US voters in Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign and the Pro-Brexit campaign. The company was previously led by Steve Bannon, who was recently jailed for refusing to cooperate in the investigation on January 6.
The settlement should provide payment to approximately 311,127 people. Eligible individuals must have a Facebook account from November 2015 to December 2015, spend more than 30 days in Australia during that time and personally or have a Facebook friend who has installed the This is Your Digital Life app. Meta previously agreed to pay $725 million to US users.
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