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South Korea has issued Meta with a $15 million fine after the company collated sensitive personal information and passed it to advertisers without the authority to do so.
The data was collected from around 980,000 Facebook users, including their political views and sexual orientation, according to the national regulator, the Personal Information Protection Commission.
The financial penalty, worth 21.6 billion won in the local currency, followed a four-year probe by the Commission, the latest investigation into Meta by authorities in South Korea.
A statement released on Tuesday detailed how the user data was shared with approximately 4000 advertisers after Meta scraped the pages users liked or the ads they clicked on.
Lee Eun Jung, a director at the commission that conducted the investigation outlined how the parent company of Instagram and WhatsApp deliberately listed ads to identify users interested in specific themes, such as religion, same-sex and transgender issues, as well as the subject of North Korean escapees
“While Meta collected this sensitive information and used it for individualized services, they made only vague mentions of this use in their data policy and did not obtain specific consent,” said Lee.
In September, Meta admitted to scraping the public data of Australians without any option to opt-out.
Further security lapses led to data breaches
South Korea’s privacy laws establish explicit protection for information relating to personal beliefs such as political views and sexual orientation, prohibiting companies from processing this data without the specific consent of the individuals involved.
Additionally, Lee added that Meta compromised the privacy of Facebook users by failing to enact basic security measures.
Inactive accounts were not blocked or removed, opening the door to hackers to force access to profiles by forging identities and requesting password resets. It was revealed Meta approved these requests without effective verification, leading to data breaches impacting at least 10 South Korean Facebook users.
Image credit: Via Midjourney
