The Irish data protection commission has fined Meta Platforms Inc.’s Irish branch €251 million after two investigations into a personal data breach that it said affected 29 million customers globally.
Meta Platforms Ireland Limited reported the breach in September 2018. It affected data including as full names, email addresses, phone numbers, timeliness posts, and groups to which the user belonged, according to a watchdog statement on Tuesday.
According to the announcement, about three million of the impacted customers were from the European Union and the European Economic Area.
According to the statement, the breach occurred as a result of unauthorised third parties using Facebook user tokens.
The DPC determined that the IT behemoth violated GDPR regulations by neglecting to document facts about breaches and the steps taken to address them. It also acknowledged that it had failed to meet its requirements to ensure that, by default, only personal data required for particular purposes was handled.
This year, the platform has already received criticism from Ireland’s watchdog, which in September fined it €91 million for a probe into the company’s password storage practices.
It only adds to a record €1.2 billion European Union privacy fine that the tech giant was handed last year by the same commission when it was accused of shipping users’ data to the US.
The fines are part of the EU’s broader big tech crackdown, which the Irish watchdog plays a large part in thanks to being the lead privacy regulator for some of the biggest tech firms with an EU base in the country.
The DPC will publish the full decision and further related information in due course, it said.
Meta said it will appeal the decisions.
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