Meta fine: Italy hits Facebook with 805m euro penalty

Meta fine news from Europe: Italy's data protection authority has ordered Facebook's parent company to pay 805 million euros (about US$880 million) for accessing Android users' photo galleries without their specific consent. Meta says it strongly disagrees with the decision and calls the penalty disproportionate.

The regulator announced the decision on Saturday, according to an AFP report published by the Bangkok Post. It said the Facebook app for Android collected photos, videos and related metadata from Italian users "without obtaining specific consent and without properly informing them".

What the Meta fine is about

The case centres on Facebook's gallery suggestions feature, which has been available since 2023. While people browse the app, it suggests photos and videos from their phone's gallery as ideas for new posts.

According to the Italian authority, Facebook asked for gallery access through a single permission covering the whole app. That request came after a generic notice about enabling other features. As a result, users could not tell that they were also agreeing to let the app pull suggestions from their personal photos.

What Meta must change

The regulator has told Meta to ask for permission in a separate, specific request for the gallery feature. The company must also explain clearly that the feature involves access to the user's photo gallery and show people how to turn it off.

A Meta spokesperson said the company "strongly" disagrees with the regulator's assessment and with the size of the penalty.

How the penalty was calculated

The authority said several factors pushed the amount up:

• the large number of people affected, around 20 million Android users in Italy;
• the length of the infringement, which it says is still ongoing for users who have not updated the app or who have already given consent;
• what it described as Meta's lack of cooperation during the investigation.

The fine equals roughly 0.4% of Meta's annual turnover, which reached US$201 billion in 2025, when the group made a net profit of US$60.5 billion.

One of Italy's biggest tech penalties

The Meta fine is among the largest an Italian authority has imposed on a tech giant. In 2021, Amazon was fined more than 1.1 billion euros for breaching competition law, a sum later cut to 752 million euros on appeal.

It also adds to a run of legal setbacks for the company. In late October, authorities in the US state of New Mexico ordered Meta to pay US$25 billion for misleading residents over the use of their data for more than a decade. That was a record fine for the company, which described it as a "tax" on freedom of expression.

Meta has been active on other fronts too, recently buying an AI coding start-up, as covered in our report on how Meta acquires Conductor.

Why Thai Facebook users should care

The Italian ruling applies only in Italy, but the issue it raises is universal. Facebook is one of the most widely used apps in Thailand, and many Thai users run it on Android phones. App permissions granted with a single tap can open access to far more personal data than people expect.

Thailand has its own Personal Data Protection Act, which generally requires consent before personal data is collected. Users who want to check what Facebook can see can review their settings:

• open the phone's settings, choose Apps, then Facebook, then Permissions;
• limit or remove photo and video access;
• check the in-app settings for any camera roll or gallery suggestion features and switch them off if unwanted.

Reviewing permissions regularly is good practice for every app. Recent cases on Android, such as the Android TV box botnet and the drive against illegal loan apps, show how much personal data can flow through apps that users trust without thinking.

Image: the Facebook app on an Android smartphone, illustrating the Meta fine in Italy. Photo by Tony Webster via Wikimedia Commons, licensed CC BY 2.0.