Italy fines Facebook's parent company Meta $880m over photo privacy

Italy’s data protection authority said on Saturday it had fined Facebook owner Meta €805 million ($880 million) for accessing photos, videos and related metadata on Android devices “without obtaining specific consent and without properly informing” users.

Meta said it would appeal. A company spokesperson said Meta “strongly disagree[s]” with the regulator’s assessment and what it called “the disproportionate level of the fine”.

The penalty concerns Facebook’s gallery suggestions feature, which has been available since 2023. The feature suggests photos and videos from a user’s phone gallery that they might want to share as posts while browsing the app.

The regulator said Facebook sought a single permission to access the gallery across the app. That request followed a generic notice about enabling other features, which the authority said did not make clear that users were also granting access for gallery suggestions.

The authority said Meta must seek separate consent for the feature, clearly explain that it accesses the phone’s photo gallery and tell users how to switch it off.

In setting the fine, the regulator cited the number of people affected, estimated at around 20 million Android users in Italy, and the length of time the practice had continued. It said the infringement was ongoing for users who had not updated the app and for those who had already granted permission. It also cited “Meta’s lack of cooperation during the investigation”.

The fine amounts to roughly 0.4 per cent of Meta’s 2025 revenue of $201 billion. The company reported a net profit of $60.5 billion that year.

The penalty is among the largest imposed on a technology company by an Italian authority. In 2021, Amazon was fined more than €1.1 billion for breaching competition rules. That penalty was reduced to €752 million on appeal.

In a separate case in late October, authorities in New Mexico ordered Meta to pay $25 billion over findings that it had misled residents about how it used their data for more than a decade. Meta called that record penalty a “tax” on freedom of expression.