Social media company Meta was fined 21.6 billion won ($15.7 million) by South Korea’s privacy watchdog on Tuesday for unlawfully gathering private information from Facebook users.
The Seoul-based Personal Information Protection Commission (PIPC) discovered that Facebook’s parent company had collected information from approximately 980,000 users on sensitive subjects like politics, sexual orientation, and religion without getting their consent, then shared it with about 4,000 advertisers in violation of local data protection laws.
With this latest fine, Meta has added another privacy sanction to its vast collection.
“Specifically, it has been found that (Meta) analyzed user behaviour data, such as pages they liked and advertisements they clicked on Facebook and created and managed advertising themes related to sensitive information,” the commission said.
After a four-year investigation, the Personal Information Protection Commission of South Korea found that, between July 2018 and March 2022, Meta illegally gathered private data about approximately 980,000 Facebook users, including their political beliefs, religion, and whether or not they were in same-sex relationships.
According to a statement by the Personal Information Protection Commission, the US tech giant collected data from around 980,000 South Korean Facebook users about their sexual orientation, political beliefs, and religion without obtaining consent from users.
We earlier reported that Meta has been fined €91 million ($101 million) for inadvertently keeping hundreds of millions of user passwords on its internal systems in plaintext rather than encrypted.
