Australia fines Meta $14 million for illegal data collection

Meta logo at headquarters in Menlo Park, California, USA

On July 26, the Australian Federal Court fined Meta, Facebook's parent company, 20 million AUD (14 million USD) for illegally collecting user data through a smartphone application.

The court also ordered Facebook's Israeli arm and the now-defunct mobile app Onavo to pay $400,000 in legal costs to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), which sued Meta.

Judge Wendy Abraham stated that between early 2016 and late 2017, Meta (then still called Facebook) advertised Onavo as an application that helps securely store users' personal information.

However, Onavo illegally collected the location, time, and frequency of users' smartphone applications and websites they visited for its own commercial purposes.

According to Justice Abraham, Meta’s failure to provide adequate notice left tens of thousands of Australians unable to make informed decisions about their data collection and use rights before downloading and using the Onavo app.

Based on the $1.1 million penalty for each consumer law breach, Justice Abraham stressed that the court could have fined Meta hundreds of billions of dollars because Australians had downloaded the app 271,220 times.

However, the number of violations can be classified as one act and the penalty just given is "sufficiently deterrent".

The ACCC and Meta have accepted the above penalties.

Meta said the judge also noted that the company did not intentionally mislead customers, noting that over the years it has developed tools to increase transparency and give users more control over how their data is used.

Last year, Meta's global revenue reached $116 billion.

According to Vietnam+