Italy fines Meta 805 million euros over photo privacy violations

Italy's data privacy authority, Garante, has fined Facebook's parent company Meta 805 million euros for accessing users' photos without their consent. The fine is worth about $887 million. The authority announced the decision on Saturday.

Garante said the Facebook app on Android devices accessed photos, videos and associated metadata stored on Italian users' smartphones without specific consent and without informing them.

The issue relates to Facebook's 'Get suggestions from gallery when browsing Facebook' feature, which surfaces photos and videos from the phone's gallery as suggestions for posting while the user browses.

According to the authority, this process violates the Italian law implementing the European Union's ePrivacy directive.

Garante also said the app's process for collecting consent is too generic, and does not allow users to fully understand the specific permissions they are granting by accepting. The suggestions option was also enabled by default.

The regulator estimates that roughly 20 million Italian Android users could have been affected.

The fine is by far the largest ever imposed by the Italian regulator. Garante said Meta's 'lack of cooperation' and the large number of people affected contributed to the size of the fine, and an earlier violation that resulted in a 2019 fine was also a contributing factor.

The amount is roughly 0.47 percent of Meta's global turnover.

Garante has told Meta to fix the unclear consent notification and to stop enabling the feature by default.

The proceedings did not address the possible use of the content to train artificial intelligence, a use that Meta denies.

Meta has not yet publicly commented on the matter, and it has the right to appeal the regulator's decision.