Ireland's Data Protection Commission announced this week that Meta Ireland, the Irish subsidiary of Facebook parent company Meta, had violated privacy provisions of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), a rule that went into effect in 2018. The GDPR mandated much stricter data privacy rules in the European Union (E.U.), which caused some growing pains upon implementation.
The Irish agency determined that Meta "transfer[red] personal data" from the E.U. to the U.S. in a manner that "did not address the risks to the fundamental rights and freedoms of data subjects," i.e. Europeans who use Facebook. It fined the social media firm 1.2 billion euros ($1.3 billion USD), the E.U.'s largest penalty on record.
