Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook and its parent company, Meta Platforms, is facing fines of up to $276 million dollars, issued by Ireland’s Data Protection Commission. After a prominent data breach that occurred in 2021, the commission’s authorities have rigorously investigated the company’s privacy policies. The data breach in 2021 resulted in exposing the personal information of more than 530 Facebook users’. This past Monday, the commission released its third fine on Meta and its related companies, resulting in combined fines of up to $900 million dollars for the company to date.
The commission, a prominent body in the European Union, has called on Meta to improve its systems for safeguarding private information. Meta has claimed that steps were made, and continue to be made in order to reduce data breaches and hackers from accessing sensitive data.
The following sources were used:
- Meta fined €265m over data protection breach that hit more than 500m users, The Guardian
- Facebook Parent Meta Fined $276 Million in Europe for Data-Scraping Leak, The Wall Street Journal