Facebook parent company Meta was fined 17 million euros (about 19 million US dollars) by the European Union for failing to prevent a series of data breaches that occurred on the Facebook platform in 2018, violating EU privacy rule.
Meta’s lead privacy watchdog in the EU, the Irish Data Protection Commission, said it found Facebook “failed to take appropriate technical and organizational measures”. In 2018, Facebook was 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 Tuesday’s penalty began in December of that year over 12 bug notifications from Facebook, some of which were caused by a software bug that gave outside developers access to millions of users’ photos.