Meta Faces $15 Million Fine in South Korea for Privacy Violations

South Korea's privacy watchdog fined Meta $15 million for collecting and sharing sensitive Facebook user data without consent. Following a four-year investigation, this marks another penalty from South Korean authorities as they scrutinize Meta’s handling of personal information. Regulators demand clearer consent processes for data collection.

Meta, the social media giant, has been fined 21.6 billion won ($15 million) by South Korea's privacy watchdog for illegally harvesting sensitive personal data from Facebook users and sharing it with advertisers. This decision is part of ongoing scrutiny by South Korean authorities over the company's data practices.

The Personal Information Protection Commission (PIPC) found that from July 2018 to March 2022, Meta unlawfully collected user data concerning religion, political views, and sexual orientation from around 980,000 Facebook users and shared it with roughly 4,000 advertisers. South Korea’s strict privacy laws protect such data and require explicit user consent for its use.

The PIPC criticized Meta for not implementing adequate security measures, allowing hackers to exploit inactive pages, resulting in data breaches. This comes on the heels of other penalties for Meta, such as a combined $72 million fine with Google in 2022 for tracking users without consent.

(With inputs from agencies.)