At the end of a long investigation, the Privacy Guarantor ha fined €805 million Meta Platforms Ireland Limited for having accessed personal photos and videos without explicit consent. The provision concerns the function “Get gallery suggestions when you browse Facebook”, available from 2023, which operates in a non-transparent way, violating privacy regulations.
Through the Facebook app for Android devices – writes the Guarantor – the company had access to photographs, videos and related metadata stored in the smartphones of Italian users without having acquired specific consent and without having adequately informed them
According to what emerged from the investigations, which started from a report from July 2025 of Consumer Protection Center of Bolzanothe app has access to the gallery, and that access comes requested with a single authorizationvalid for the entire app and for multiple functions with different needs.
But not only that: as the Guarantorthe authorization is preceded by a generic warning which does not allow the user to understand that he is also authorizing suggestions from the gallery. And, perhaps even more seriously, the function was preset as active.
So, if granted in full, such a permission allows the app to read the entire photo archive of the deviceusually permanently, without the user, nor the Authority, being able to verify which information is actually used.
The Guarantor recalled that the violated rule, art. 122 of the Privacy Code which implements the European ePrivacy Directive, protects the smartphone as part of the person’s private sphere. Any access to the information it contains therefore requires free and informed consent, regardless of the transmission of data or the existence of damage. The Authority also rejected the objection of incompetence raised by the company in favor of the Irish authority, because the ePrivacy regulation does not provide for the “one-stop shop” mechanism
The amount of the fine (805 million euros, equal to approximately 0.47% of global turnover of the group) was calculated considering thelarge number of Android users involved (estimated at around 20 million), the duration of the violation (which is still ongoing), a collaboration provided during the investigation in question “poor”as well as a previous provision of 2019 towards the company.
As explained by the Guarantor, in addition to paying the fine, Meta will have to:
Source: Guarantor for the Protection of Personal Data
