South Korea’s privacy watchdog fines Meta $15 million for illegally collecting data from Korean Facebook users

11/08/2024 / By Arsenio Toledo

The South Korean Personal Information Protection Commission (PIPC), the country’s national data protection government agency, has fined Big Tech company Meta 21.6 billion won ($15.46 million) for illegally collecting sensitive personal information from Korean users on Facebook.

This is the latest in a series of fines and penalties the government of South Korea has slapped Facebook’s parent company with in recent years as the PIPC and other government agencies stepped up their scrutiny of the tech giant’s handling of private information on its platforms, including Instagram and WhatsApp. (Related: Harvard students demonstrate how Meta smart glasses can be used to instantly identify people and access their personal information.)

The fine against Meta comes after the PIPC conducted a four-year-long investigation that concluded that Meta unlawfully collected sensitive information from about 980,000 Facebook users – including their religion, political leanings and whether they were in same-sex relationships – from July 2018 to March 2022.

This personal data was then sold to around 4,000 advertisers.

South Korean privacy laws are fairly strict, and provide substantial protections for maintaining the privacy of personal information, including personal beliefs, political views and sexual behaviors. South Korean privacy regulations do not allow companies to process or use this kind of personal data without the specific consent of the people involved.

A statement by the PIPC noted that Meta specifically “analyzed user behavior data such as pages they liked and advertisements they clicked on Facebook and created and managed advertising themes related to sensitive information.”

The users were then placed into very detailed categories to sell this information to advertisers who can then bombard the users with targeted ads. These categories include North Korean defectors, followers of certain religions and people who identified as gay or transgender.

“While Meta collected this sensitive information and used it for individualized services, they made only vague mentions of this use in their data policy and did not obtain specific consent,” said Lee Eun Jung, a PIPC director and the head of the agency’s investigation against Meta’s infractions.

Meta failed to protect privacy of Facebook users with simple cybersecurity measures

Lee further warned that Meta has unfairly declined requests by affected users to access their collected personal information.

Furthermore, Lee accused Meta of failing to implement even the most basic security measures to protect the privacy of South Korean Facebook users, such as removing or blocking inactive pages.

As a result, Lee warned that hackers were able to use these inactive pages to forge identities and request password resets for the accounts of at least 10 South Korean Facebook users. Meta approved these requests without properly verifying the identity of the individuals who made them, resulting in data breaches for the affected individuals.

Meta’s main office in South Korea has declined to comment other than to say that it would “carefully review” the PIPC’s decision.

This is not the first time South Korea has fined Meta for privacy violations. In 2020, Meta was slapped with a 6.7 billion won ($4.8 million) fine for providing personal information regarding its users to third parties without their consent.

In 2022, the PIPC fined both Google and Meta a combined 100 billion won ($72 million) for tracking the online behavior of consumers without their consent and then selling or using that data for targeted advertisements. This represents the largest penalty the PIPC has ever imposed for privacy law violations.

Find the latest news about tech giant Meta at MetaTyranny.com.

Watch this video discussing how Meta’s “smart glasses” are extremely dangerous and could change society for the worse.

This video is from the Neroke-5 channel on Brighteon.com.