giant Facebook fined four million
The turning point in San Marino “Data stolen from citizens” Four million fine to the giant Facebook
San Marino, 27 January 2023 – Sometimes it also happens that David gets the better of the giant Goliath. Let the small Republic of San Marino raise its voice against Facebook, the social media giant. Meta Inc., in fact, will have to pay the fine of four million euros imposed on Facebook by the Authority for the protection of personal data of the Titano in 2019 for the dissemination, deemed unlawful, of the personal data of around 12,700 San Marino citizens.
Name, surname, home address, phone number, email. Data stolen, sold on the web and uploaded to online forums available to anyone. This is the discovery made by nearly half a billion Facebook users around the world. Of these, almost 13,000 are citizens of San Marino. Mark Zuckerberg’s company had immediately appealed to the court and then to the San Marino Court of Appeal, trusting in the annulment of the provision of the Titan’s privacy guarantor. Appeal that was judged inadmissible by sentence number 3 of 25 January of the San Marino appeal judge.
The sanction is therefore enforceable. And it risks creating a headache not least to the giant Goliath. Why arrive, calculator in hand, if all the states sue Zuckerberg’s social network, on the basis of this historic sentence, in the end the damage to Meta could amount to more than 100 billion. The Irish Privacy Authority, which had taken action after the opening of the investigation in San Marino and using stable contacts with colleagues in the Titan Republic, recently fined Facebook for 265 million euros. Even there Facebook would have appealed, but now the San Marino sentence could create a dangerous precedent for the social network. Going into the merits of the incident, the San Marino sentence of judge Valeria Pierfelici recognized serious responsibility in the behavior of Facebook (now Meta Inc.) which “should have taken the appropriate security measures to prevent the collection of users’ personal data”. The appeal judge deemed he “agrees 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 prevention and defense mechanisms aimed at avoiding perpetration of any action potentially harmful to the confidentiality of the data of the people who join the virtual partnership”.
“The becoming final of this sanction is relevant not only because for the first time it is recognized an infringement of this seriousness, but because the Guarantor of a small State sanctioned the technological giant, which on the occasion protected the confidentiality of the personal data of only 12,700 San Marino citizens”, explains Umberto Rapetto, president of the Privacy Guarantor of the small Republic in two steps away from Romagna. “We are disappointed by this decision – comments a Meta spokesman – and we are examining it. We made changes to our systems back in 2019, such as removing the ability to scrape user data using phone numbers. Unauthorized data scraping is unacceptable and against our rules.”