Meta avoideda €4BN GDPR fine over unlawful ads, says noyb
This recent month saw the European Union deliver a massive €390 million privacy fine to Meta after discovering that they were running behavioral ads on Facebook and Instagram without any legal basis. However, despite the size of this penalty, it is not nearly enough to dissuade other companies from committing similar violations of the bloc’s privacy laws.
That is according to noyb, the not-for-profit that filed the initial complaint against Meta over their ‘forced consent’ element back in May 2018. Unhappy with the outcome, noyb has now penned a letter to the European Data Protection Board (EDPB) expressing further concerns about the Irish regulator neglecting to properly investigate the financial gains that Meta reaped through their unlawful data processing despite the EDPB’s December directive to find the claimed basis for their ads invalid and increase the severity of Meta’s punishment.
The Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) recently rejected the EDPB’s direction to calculate Meta’s financial benefits from running ads that infringed upon EU data protection laws. Despite increasing the fine to €390 million, this measure does not effectively illustrate the seriousness of the systematic breach of European citizens’ rights, nor does it satisfy the Board’s directive for the DPC to determine the illicit profits obtained by Meta.
Source: Meta dodged a €4BN privacy fine over unlawful ads, argues GDPR complainant | TechCrunch
