In Italy, Meta fined 805 million euros for accessing the photos of its users without their consent

Facebook's parent company, Meta, was fined a hefty 805 million euros in Italy for accessing photos without obtaining "specific" consent from users, the Italian Personal Data Protection Authority announced on Saturday. Via the Facebook application for Android devices, Meta had access to the photographs, videos and associated metadata of Italian users “without having obtained specific consent and without having duly informed them”, denounced the authority in a press release. At the end of October, Meta was already ordered in New Mexico 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. A “high number of people affected” 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 functionalities”), which did not allow the user to understand that they were also authorizing suggestions from their gallery. Meta will now have to “seek consent by means of a separate and specific request for this functionality and clearly explain to users what it is for, that it involves access to the gallery and how to deactivate it”. 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”.

The amount of the sanction represents approximately 0.4% of the group's annual turnover, which reached $201 billion in 2025, for a net profit of $60.5 billion.

Machine-translated from French