Meta was fined more than $100 million by the social media giant’s European Union privacy regulator on Friday for a security flaw involving passwords for Facebook users.
The Irish Data Protection Commission said it fined the US technology company 91 million euros ($101.6 million) following an investigation.
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The watchdog began investigating in 2019 after being notified by Meta that some passwords had been inadvertently stored internally in plain text, meaning they were not encrypted and could be searched by employees.
Deputy Commissioner Graham Doyle said it is widely accepted that user passwords should not be stored in plain text, “taking into account the risks of abuse”.
Meta said a security review found that a subset of Facebook users’ passwords were being temporarily recorded in a readable format.
“We took immediate action to correct this error and there is no evidence that these passwords were abused or accessed inappropriately,” the company said in a statement. “We proactively raised this issue with our principal regulator, the Irish Data Protection Commission, and have engaged constructively with them throughout this investigation.
It is the latest in a series of hefty fines for Meta and its social media platforms by the Dublin-based watchdog, which is the company’s main regulator under the strict data privacy regulations of the 27 countries of the EU. They include a €405 million fine for Instagram for mishandling teen data, a €5.5 million fine related to WhatsApp and a €1.2 billion fine for Meta for transatlantic data transfers.
(Only the title and image of this report may have been modified by Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
First published: September 27, 2024 | 19:02 IS
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