The social network Instagram, a subsidiary of the Meta group, was sanctioned to pay the record sum of 405 million euros for failures in the treatment of personal data of its underage users, The representative of the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) announced this Monday.
“We adopted our final decision last Friday, which foresees a fine of 405 million euros. The details will be published next week,” said the Irish regulator acting on behalf of the European Union (EU) which also oversees Facebook, with regional headquarters in Ireland.
This is the harshest decision inflicted by this authority since 2018, when the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) gave regulators more power to protect consumers against the domination of Facebook, Google, Apple and Twitter. , indicated the AFP news agency.
For its part, a spokesperson for Meta, the parent company of Facebook (to which Instagram belongs) told RTE that the group plans to appeal the decision, alleging that the investigation had focused on parameters that were modified a year ago.
The DPC opened an investigation at the end of 2020 to determine if the application had put in place the necessary firewalls to protect user data, especially in the case of minors, since it is mandatory to be 13 years old or older to open an Instagram account.
The DPC’s concern was, in particular, that it was too easy for users under the age of 18 to open a professional account, because this type of account requires people to make their data public and visible to the entire partner networkl.
The regulator also charged Instagram that content on minors’ accounts had been open, by default, at times to all users and was not restricted to followers of those accounts.
