Italy fines Meta $880 mn over photo privacy: authority

MILAN

A Meta logo is shown on a video screen at LlamaCon 2025, an AI developer conference, in Menlo Park, Calif., April 29, 2025. (AP File Photo)

Italian regulators fined Facebook parent company Meta 805 million euros ($880 million) for accessing users' photos without their "specific" consent, the country's data protection authority said on Nov. 14.

Through the Facebook application for Android devices, Meta accessed photographs, videos and related metadata belonging to Italian users "without obtaining specific consent and without properly informing them," the authority said in a statement.

Meta said it would appeal the decision.

A company spokesperson said "we strongly disagree" with the assessment by the regulators "and the disproportionate level of the fine".

In late October, authorities in New Mexico ordered Meta to pay $25 billion for having misled the state's residents for more than a decade over use of their data, a record fine for the company, which slammed it as a "tax" on freedom of expression.

The latest fine is among the largest an Italian authority has ever imposed on a tech giant.

In 2021, Amazon received a more than 1.1-billion-euro fine for breaching competition law.

That sum was subsequently reduced to 752 million euros on appeal.

According to Italy's regulator, Facebook requested access to the gallery via a single authorization valid for the entire app, preceded by a generic notice requesting enabling of other features, which did not allow users to understand that they were also authorising suggestions from their gallery.

It imposed a fine amounting to roughly 0.4 per cent of the group's annual turnover, which hit $201 billion in 2025, for a net profit of $60.5 billion.