Acting on behalf of the European Union (EU), the Irish regulator was ordered to pay a record 405m euros to the social network Instagram, a subsidiary of the Meta group, for failures to process the personal data of minors. Monday.).

“We took our final decision last Friday and it foresees a fine of 405m euros. Details will be released next week,” a representative of the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) told AFP.

This is the toughest decision by this authority since 2018, when the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) gave regulators more power to protect consumers against the dominance of Facebook, Google, Apple and Twitter.

DPC monitors the EU account on Facebook, as its regional headquarters is in Ireland.

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A spokesperson for Meta, the parent company of Facebook (which Instagram belongs to), told the media: RTE He said the group plans to appeal the decision, claiming that the investigation focuses on parameters changed a year ago.

The regulator launched an investigation at the end of 2020 to determine whether the app had deployed the necessary firewalls to protect user data, especially in the case of minors, as it was mandatory to be 13 years old or older. To open an account on Instagram.

worried

DPC was particularly concerned that it would be too easy for users under the age of 18 to open a professional account. This account type requires users to make their data public; this means that the data is visible to the entire social network.

The regulator also accused Instagram that the content of minors’ accounts is available to all users by default and is not limited to the followers of those accounts.