Instagram receives a million dollar fine for violating the privacy of minors

The social network Instagram, a subsidiary of the Meta group, was sanctioned to pay 405 million euros, a record, for failures in the treatment of personal data of minors, the Irish regulator, acting on behalf of the European Union (EU), announced on Monday. ). “We adopted our final decision last Friday and it provides for a fine of 405 million euros. The details will be published next week,” a representative of the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) told AFP. (Also read: Instagram deletes official PornHub account after complaints about its content). This is the harshest decision inflicted by this authority since 2018, when the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) gave regulators more power to protect consumers against the domination of Facebook, Google, Apple and Twitter. The DPC supervises Facebook on behalf of the EU, as the latter has its regional headquarters in Ireland. A spokesperson for Meta, the parent company of Facebook (to which
Instagram) told RTE that the group plans to appeal the decision, alleging that the investigation had focused on parameters that were modified a year ago. The regulator had opened an investigation at the end of 2020 to determine if the application had put in place the necessary firewalls to protect user data, especially in the case of minors, since it is mandatory to be 13 years old or older to open a account on Instagram. (You can read: Twitter tests function of editing tweets up to 30 minutes after publication). The DPC was especially concerned that users under 18 years of age found it too easy to open a professional account. This type of account requires users to make their data public, which means that these are visible to the entire social network. The regulator also accused Instagram that the content of minors’ accounts had been open, by default, in some moments to all users and that it was not restricted to the followers of those accounts.AFPMore news