EU Privacy Regulator Fines Meta EUR 91 Million Over Password Storage

The lead European Union privateness regulator fined social media large Meta 91 million euros ($101.5 million) on Friday for inadvertently storing some customers’ passwords with out safety or encryption.

The inquiry was opened 5 years in the past after Meta notified Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC) that it had saved some passwords in ‘plaintext’. Meta publicly acknowledged the incident on the time and the DPC stated the passwords weren’t made accessible to exterior events.

“It is widely accepted that user passwords should not be stored in plaintext, considering the risks of abuse that arise from persons accessing such data,” Irish DPC Deputy Commissioner Graham Doyle stated in an announcement.

A Meta spokesperson stated the corporate took speedy motion to repair the error after figuring out it throughout a safety evaluate in 2019, and that there isn’t a proof the passwords have been abused or accessed improperly.

Meta engaged constructively with the DPC all through the inquiry, the spokesperson added in an announcement on Friday.

The DPC is the lead EU regulator for many of the prime U.S. web companies because of the location of their EU operations within the nation.

It has up to now fined Meta a complete of two.5 billion euros for breaches below the bloc’s General Data Protection Regulation’s (GDPR), launched in 2018, together with a file 1.2 billion euro tremendous in 2023 that Meta is interesting.

© Thomson Reuters 2024

(This story has not been edited by NDTV employees and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)