Facebook: Meta receives a heavy fine of 805 million euros in Italy for accessing photos without consent

To set the amount of the sanction, the authority explains that it took into account "the high number of people affected" (around 20 million Android users in Italy), the duration of the violation, "still ongoing for those who have not updated the application and for those who have already given their authorization to the system", as well as "the poor cooperation of Meta during the investigation". This represents approximately 0.4% of the group's annual turnover, which reached $201 billion in 2025, for a net profit of $60.5 billion.

More precisely, the sanction targeting Facebook concerns the “Get suggestions from the gallery” functionality, available since 2023, which offers the user, while browsing, photos and videos from their phone's gallery as ideas for publications.

According to the Italian authority, Facebook requested access to the gallery by means of a single authorization valid for the entire application, preceded by a generic notice ("activate other features"), which did not allow the user to understand that they were also authorizing suggestions from their gallery.

Several fines in Italy against Gafam

This is not the first sanction for the American giant. At the end of October, New Mexico was already ordered to pay $25 billion for having deceived the inhabitants of this American state for more than ten years about the use of their data, a record sanction for the group, which denounced a “tax” on freedom of expression.

The new sanction announced on Saturday is also among the most significant ever imposed by an Italian authority against a technological giant. Amazon was fined more than 1.1 billion euros in 2021 for violating competition law. This sanction was then reduced to 752 million euros after appeal.

Meta can also appeal. Contacted, the American group did not respond immediately on Saturday afternoon.

Machine-translated from French