Meta has been fined a record 1.2 billion euros, the largest fine ever to come out of the GDPR

[samiaseo75]

Meta , which is reportedly facing its third round of mass layoffs within its organization (already severely depleted in recent months), will now have to deal with a historic fine on European soil.

Ireland's Data Protection Commission announced on Monday that it will fine Meta €1.2 billion for breaching EU privacy regulations.

The company, which is responsible for enforcing ecuador phone number data EU data protection laws at Meta (whose European headquarters are in Dublin), accuses the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp of failing to adequately protect the personal information of Europeans from surveillance practices implemented by US security agencies.

The fine imposed by the Irish Data Protection Commission on Meta is the largest sanction to come out of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) of the European Union , which will take five years to come into force on May 25 .

In 2021, another American multinational, Amazon, was also the recipient of a large fine directly related to the violation of the GDPR , but the fine now imposed on Meta exceeds that fine by almost 500 million euros.

In addition to paying a fine of 1.2 billion euros, Meta must also suspend any transfer of personal data to the United States within a period of five months.

A decade of legal battles in the courts of the old continent
The fact that Meta has been fined so unusually high is due to the fact that the company led by Mark Zuckerberg has continued to follow a practice that was previously declared illegal by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) in July 2020. At that time, the highest EU court ruled that the transfer of personal data of European citizens by multinationals such as Meta violated EU law. Once sent to the United States, such data is accessible to the North American country's security agencies without the judicial guarantees prevalent in the EU.