EU privacy regulator fines Meta $263 million

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, has been fined €251 million (approximately $263 million) by the European Union's Data Protection Commission (DPC) for a 2018 data breach that compromised the personal information of 29 million Facebook users.

The breach occurred when hackers exploited vulnerabilities in Facebook's "View As" feature, which allowed users to see their profiles as others would. By leveraging this feature, unauthorized third parties gained access to users' personal data, including names, contact details, locations, work information, birth dates, religious affiliations, genders, and children's personal data. Approximately 3 million of the affected accounts were within the EU and European Economic Area.