Meta fined €250 million by Ireland data body over a 2018 breach

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram, has reportedly been fined more than €250 million by the Irish Data Protection Commission over a data breach.

The said data breach affected approximately 29 million Facebook accounts globally, of which some three million were based in the EU/EEA. It was reported by Meta in September 2018.

The personal data involved in the breach included account users’ full names, email addresses, phone numbers, locations, places of work, dates of birth, religions, genders, posts on timelines, groups of which a user was a member and children’s personal data.

The breach arose from the exploitation by unauthorised third parties of user tokens on the Facebook platform.

It was remedied by Meta in Ireland and its US parent company Meta shortly after the discovery. But the damage was already done and it was immense.

The decisions in relation to the breach, which were made by the Commissioners for Data Protection, Dr Des Hogan and Dale Sunderland, included a number of reprimands and an order to pay administrative fines totaling €251 million.