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Italy’s data protection regulator fined Meta, the parent company of Facebook, €805 million ($880 million) on Saturday for accessing users’ photos without their “specific” consent.
The authority said that through the Facebook app for Android phones, Meta accessed Italian users’ photos, videos and metadata, the descriptive data attached to files, without obtaining specific consent or informing them properly. Meta said it will appeal. A spokesperson said “we strongly disagree” with the regulator’s assessment and with “the disproportionate level of the fine.”
In late October, authorities in New Mexico ordered Meta to pay $25 billion for misleading the state’s residents over the use of their data for more than a decade, a record penalty that the company called a “tax” on freedom of expression.
Saturday’s fine is among the largest an Italian authority has imposed on a tech giant. Amazon was fined more than €1.1 billion in 2021 for breaching competition law, a sum later cut to €752 million on appeal.
The penalty concerns gallery suggestions, available since 2023, which offers photos and videos from a user’s phone as ideas for posts while they browse.
The regulator said Facebook requested gallery access through a single permission covering the whole app, after a generic notice about enabling other features, so users could not tell they were also allowing gallery suggestions.
Meta must now seek consent through a separate, specific request for the feature, state clearly that it involves access to the photo gallery and explain how to turn it off.
In setting the amount, the authority cited “the high number of people affected,” about 20 million Android users in Italy, and the duration of the violation, which it said is still ongoing for users who have not updated the app and for those who already gave consent. It also pointed to Meta’s lack of cooperation during the investigation. The fine equals roughly 0.4% of the group’s annual revenue, which reached $201 billion in 2025, with a net profit of $60.5 billion.
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