Meta Hit With $15 Million Fine After Being Accused Of Illegal Data Collection On Facebook

South Korea is slapping tech giant Meta with a mega fine worth $15 million. The country’s top privacy watchdog says Meta illegally collected Facebook users’ data including sensitive information, political views, and details about gender.

Meta was also accused of sharing personal information with thousands of other advertisers, raising eyebrows about the company’s real intentions behind the act.

This is just another addition to the long list of penalties against the firm by South Korea’s government which has targeted Facebook’s parent firm for several years now. For this reason, the company continues to build up scrutiny against Meta who is also the owner of popular platforms like Instagram and WhatsApp. The country knows how a lot of personal data is also shared through these apps and therefore guards cannot be left down.

The news comes after the country wrapped up a four-year-long investigation against the company which says they found a lot of evidence speaking about sensitive data collection. The total figure of users outlined is 980k on Facebook where religion and politics were mostly targeted as well as those linked to similar gender unions.

The firm was found to share data with over 4000 advertisers which is strictly prohibited and goes against South Korean laws that bars collection and processing of this material. The commission similarly spoke about how Meta collected so much sensitive data by simple analysis of users’ pages on the app and also by gauging which ads they engaged most with.

It then categorized those ads to better highlight the users that were interested in topics like same gender, politics, and religion including trans matters. Other controversial topics included North Korea.

The report also shared how Meta silently collected the information and used it for its personal gains with only vague mentions of the usage through its data policy. There was a clear lack of consent taken from the users’ end.

Facebook clearly broke users’ trust and failed to provide them with necessary security protection like removing inactive pages or blocking them altogether. As a result of this behavior, it became an easy target for hackers to use the domains and forge identities while requesting resets for passwords.

This is a major hit for Meta who was already fined by the EU regulators in September for security lapse which arose in 2019. The fine there went above the $100M mark and showed the company’s lapse in encryption.

Image: DIW-Aigen

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by Dr. Hura Anwar via Digital Information World