The reason for imposing the fine is a media disclosure from about a year and a half ago, according to which a huge database with personal information – including full names, dates of birth, phone numbers and email addresses – about over half a billion Facebook and Instagram users, including celebrities and public messengers, was revealed. The information was collected between 2018 and 2019 by ‘mining’ information through tools that were supposed to be blocked from use by outside parties after the Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2018. But the existence of the database proved, according to the Commission’s investigation, that Facebook (as it was then called) failed to protect the users’ information, thus violating the European data protection law.
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This is the fourth fine imposed by the Commission on the company in a year and a half: last year, WhatsApp was fined 225 million euros after it refused to disclose whether or how it shares information about its users with the parent company (something it expressly committed to the authorities not to do when it was purchased in 2014); At the beginning of the year, an additional fine of 17 million dollars was imposed on Meta for 12 other loopholes that it allegedly failed to fix; And last September, Meta was ordered to pay 405 million euros for violating the law in the privacy settings for minor users on Instagram. In total, it is about a billion dollars within a year and a half.