Meta, the parent company of Facebook, has recently faced a fine of approximately $15.7 million from South Korea’s data protection agency. The Seoul’s Personal Information Protection Commission (PIPC) discovered that Meta had been processing sensitive user data without a proper legal basis and sharing it with advertisers. This data included information on topics such as politics, sexuality, and religion, collected from around 980,000 users.
The company obtained this sensitive information by analyzing users’ liked pages, clicked ads, and other tracking methods, violating local data protection laws. Examples of the compiled data included users being categorized as North Korean defectors, followers of specific religions, or identifying as transgender or gay. In addition, Meta failed to prevent data exposure to hackers and declined a user data access request.
In response to the fine, Meta’s spokesman Matthew Pollard stated that the company is committed to engaging with the PIPC to protect the privacy of South Korean users. They will review the full written decision once it is shared with them.
