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Mark Zuckerberg's Meta Platforms Inc. has been fined €805 million ($887 million) by Italy's data protection authority over a Facebook feature that drew on photos and videos stored in the galleries of Android phones.
The authority announced the penalty on Nov. 14. It was imposed on Meta Platforms Ireland Ltd., the unit that runs Facebook for European users and which had contested Italy's jurisdiction over the case. The regulator said the fine equals about 0.47% of the group's global turnover.
The feature at the center of the case, called "Get suggestions from gallery when browsing Facebook," was switched on by default. Facebook sought access to a user's gallery through a single permission that covered several app functions with different purposes, the authority said. About 20 million Android users in Italy were affected.
The regulator ruled that the practice breached a European privacy directive, written into Italian law, that treats a smartphone as part of a person's private sphere. Access to what is stored on the device requires "free and informed consent," it said.
Meta has 60 days to disable the feature and to seek separate consent from users before using it again. The authority said the company's "lack of cooperation" during the investigation counted against it when it set the size of the penalty.
"We strongly disagree" with the assessment by the regulators "and the disproportionate level of the fine," a Meta spokesperson said.
The Italian penalty adds to a long list of European actions against the Menlo Park, California-based company, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. Ireland's Data Protection Commission, Meta's lead privacy regulator in the European Union, fined the company a record €1.2 billion in 2023 over transfers of European users' data to the U.S. Italy's competition authority has also fined Meta in the past over how it explained its use of personal data to users.
Zuckerberg, 42, co-founded Facebook in his Harvard University dorm room in 2004 and remains Meta's chairman and chief executive officer. He controls the company through a class of super-voting shares and owns about 13% of it, a stake that makes him one of the richest people in the world.
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