The lead European Union privateness regulator fined social media big Meta 91 million euros ($101.5 million) on Friday for inadvertently storing some customers’ passwords with out safety or encryption.
The inquiry was opened 5 years in the past after Meta notified Eire’s Information Safety Fee (DPC) that it had saved some passwords in ‘plaintext’. Meta publicly acknowledged the incident on the time and the DPC stated the passwords weren’t made out there to exterior events.
“It’s broadly accepted that consumer passwords shouldn’t be saved in plaintext, contemplating the dangers of abuse that come up from individuals accessing such knowledge,” Irish DPC Deputy Commissioner Graham Doyle stated in a press release.
A Meta spokesperson stated the corporate took speedy motion to repair the error after figuring out it throughout a safety evaluate in 2019, and that there isn’t a proof the passwords have been abused or accessed improperly.
Meta engaged constructively with the DPC all through the inquiry, the spokesperson added in a press release on Friday.
The DPC is the lead EU regulator for a lot of the high U.S. web companies as a result of location of their EU operations within the nation.
It has to this point fined Meta a complete of two.5 billion euros for breaches beneath the bloc’s Normal Information Safety Regulation’s (GDPR), launched in 2018, together with a document 1.2 billion euro nice in 2023 that Meta is interesting.