Meta Platforms, Inc., Facebook’s parent company, faces hefty penalties after two significant data breaches. The Irish Data Protection Commission (IDPC) recently fined the company $263 million for a 2018 data breach that exposed millions of users’ personal information.
Meta also settled a separate lawsuit in Australia for $31.7 million in connection to the 2016 Cambridge Analytica scandal.
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The 2018 Facebook Data Breach
In 2018, hackers exploited a vulnerability in Facebook’s “View As” feature, allowing unauthorized access to user accounts. According to a Meta Security Update attackers used this flaw to obtain access tokens, effectively hijacking the accounts of approximately 29 million global users.
The stolen data included sensitive information such as users’ full names, email addresses, phone numbers, locations, dates of birth, religions, and even children’s personal details. Notably, three million of the affected accounts belonged to users in the European Union (EU) and the European Economic Area (EEA).
