By Adam SatarianoIrish regulators said Instagram violated European data protection rules. It was the latest move by authorities in Europe and the U.S. related to child protection online.
Meta said it disagreed with the decision by Irish regulators and planned to appeal.Credit...Jim Wilson/The New York Times
Meta was fined roughly $400 million for breaking European Union data privacy laws for its treatment of children’s data on Instagram, the latest in a series of steps by authorities in Europe and the United States to crack down on what information is collected and shared by companies about young people online.
Ireland’s Data Protection Commission said it decided on Sept. 2 to impose what would be one of the largest fines to date under the General Data Protection Regulation, or G.D.P.R., the four-year-old European data privacy law that has been criticized for being weakly enforced.
Policymakers are attempting to better safeguard children’s data generated on social media, online video games and other internet services. California lawmakers last week passed a law that would require many online services to increase protections for children. Britain passed a similar law last year.
European laws give children’s data special protections. In 2020, Ireland’s Data Protection Commission began investigating Instagram for making the accounts of children aged 13 to 17 set to public by default, and for allowing teenagers with business accounts on Instagram, many of them aspiring influencers, to make public their email addresses and phone numbers.
Graham Doyle, a spokesman for the Irish Data Protection Commission, confirmed that Instagram had been fined 405 million euros, or about $402 million, and said more details about the decision would be released next week. Politico first reported the fine.
