The leaked information, spotted by Insiderwas posted on an online hacking forum and contained the full names, phone numbers, locations and dates of birth of users on the platform from 2018 to 2019. At the time, Meta said the attacker obtained the information through a vulnerability the company fixed in 2019 and that this was the same information involved in an earlier leak indicated by Motherboard in January 2021.
This is the third fine the DPC has imposed on Meta this year. In March, the DPC fined Meta $18.6 million USD for poor record keeping related to a series of data breaches in 2018 that exposed the information of up to 30 million Facebook users. The European regulator also fined Meta $402 million in September following an investigation into Instagram’s handling of teen data.
Meta has been fined nearly $700 million by the DPC in 2022 — and that doesn’t include the $267 million fine WhatsApp imposed last year for violating European data privacy laws. In a statement obtained by Newstalk reporter Jess Kellysaid an unknown Meta spokesperson:
We made changes to our systems during that time, including removing the ability to scrape our features using phone numbers in this way. Unauthorized data scraping is unacceptable and against our rules and we will continue to work with our colleagues on this industry challenge. We are carefully reviewing this decision.
Meta didn’t respond right away The edge‘s request for comment. The company highlighted what it is doing to combat data scraping a blog post from last yearand notes that it tasks its External Data Misuse (EDM) team with detecting, blocking, and preventing scraping.
