Meta fined $880 million as Italy flags Facebook's access to phone galleries

Milan, Italy: 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 Saturday.

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.

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.

Saturday's 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 euros fine for breaching competition law.

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

Meta may also appeal the latest fine. When contacted, the US group had not responded by Saturday afternoon.

The penalty imposed on Facebook relates to its gallery suggestions feature, available since 2023, which suggests photos and videos from a user's phone gallery as ideas for posts as they are browsing.

According to Italy's regulator, Facebook requested access to the gallery via a single authorisation 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.

Meta will now notably have to seek consent by means of a separate and specific request for the feature concerned and clearly signpost what it is used for, namely that it involves access to a user's photo gallery, as well as how to disable it.

In determining the size of the fine, the authority said it took into account "the high number of people affected" -- around 20 million Android users in Italy -- and the duration of the infringement, "which is still ongoing for those who have not updated the app and for those who have already given their consent to the system".

The authority also cited "Meta's lack of cooperation during the investigation".

It imposed a fine amounting to roughly 0.4 per cent of the group's annual