Facebook data theft, 4 million fine from San Marino – Chronicle
Meta Inc. will have to pay the fine of four million euros imposed on Facebook by the Personal Data Protection Authority of the Republic of San Marino in 2019 for the dissemination, deemed unlawful, of the personal data of around 12,700 San Marino citizens. Mark Zuckerberg’s company had appealed to the Court and then to the Court of Appeal of San Marino trusting in the annulment of the provision of the Titan Privacy Guarantor. Appeal that was judged inadmissible by sentence No. 3 of 25 January 2023 of the Appeal Judge of San Marino. The sanction is therefore enforceable.
Sentence 3 of January 25, 2023 sanctioned the inadmissibility of that appeal and, going into the merits of the incident, acknowledged serious responsibility in the behavior of Facebook (now Meta Inc.) which “should have taken the appropriate security measures to prevent collection of users’ personal data”. The story of the data of 533 million Facebook users “stolen” by hackers and unduly disseminated on the Net has therefore come to an end. The judge of Appeal of San Marino Valeria Pierfelici decided to “agree with the Authority that the large amount of data acquired from third parties and the volume of traffic generated should have been immediately recognized as a dangerous anomaly and should have triggered mechanisms of prevention and defense acts to avoid the perpetration of any action potentially harmful to the confidentiality of the data of the people who join the virtual association”. “The finalization of this sanction is relevant not only because for the first time an infringement of this gravity is recognized, but because the Guarantor of a small State sanctioned the technological giant, which on the occasion protected the confidentiality of the data of only 12,700 San Marino citizens. In practice, David against Goliath”, explains to ANSA Umberto Rapetto, President of the Privacy Guarantor of the small Republic, which has just over 33 thousand inhabitants. “If the 4 million euro fine imposed by San Marino (which certainly doesn’t worry Facebook’s budget) is applied proportionally in the other States, the total amount of the fine for the total 533 million affected arithmetically reaches 166 billion euro”, calculates Rapetto, who, in fact, does not rule out such a domino effect. The Irish Privacy Authority, which had moved after the opening of the investigation in San Marino and using the stable contacts with colleagues from the Republic of the Titan, recently fined Facebook for 265 million euros. Even there Facebook would have appealed, but at this point the San Marino sentence could create a dangerous precedent for the social network.
“We are disappointed with this decision and are reviewing it. We made changes to our systems as early as 2019, such as removing the ability to scrape user data using phone numbers. Unauthorized data scraping is unacceptable and contrary to our rules. We will continue to work with the other companies in the sector on this common challenge”, thus a Meta spokesman comments on the sentence of the San Marino Appeal Judge on a fine of four million euros.
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