Dublin: Meta, the parent company of Facebook, has been fined €91 million ($101.6 million) by the European Union’s Data Protection Commission (DPC).
The fine was imposed due to Meta’s negligence in storing users’ passwords as plain text rather than encrypting them in their internal system. In March 2019, Meta Ireland informed the DPC about the breach, stating that users’ passwords were not exposed to external parties.
During the investigation, several violations of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) were uncovered, including Meta’s failure to notify the commissioner promptly about the data breach, failure to properly document the breach, inadequate security measures for storing passwords, and not implementing appropriate administrative protocols for password encryption.
