Italy's Garante Fines Meta €805 Million Over Facebook's Android Gallery Access

The case concerns a feature labelled "Get suggestions from gallery when browsing Facebook", which proposes pictures and videos from a phone's gallery as material for new posts. The Garante said the app "accessed photos, videos and associated metadata stored on Italian users' smartphones without specific consent and without informing them". It found that the practice breached the Italian law implementing the EU's ePrivacy directive.

The penalty is among the largest an Italian authority has imposed on a technology company. It equals roughly 0.47 percent of Meta's global turnover.

Facebook requested gallery access through a single authorisation covering the whole app, and the notice shown beforehand did not make clear that it would also let Facebook generate post suggestions from the photos stored there, the BBC reported. The Garante called the consent process too generic for users to understand what they were agreeing to. It also noted that the suggestions option was switched on by default, and said Meta must fix the unclear consent notice.

The authority estimated that about 20 million Italian Android users may have been affected. In setting the amount, it said it took into account "the high number of people affected" and the fact that the conduct was "still ongoing for those who have not updated the app and for those who have already given their consent to the system". It also cited "Meta's lack of co-operation" and counted an earlier violation that led to a 2019 fine against the company.

Meta said it would challenge the decision. A company spokesperson said "we strongly disagree" with the regulators' assessment "and the disproportionate level of the fine."

The proceedings did not examine whether the images could have been used to train artificial intelligence models. Meta denies using them that way.

The Italian fine comes a month after a much larger penalty in the United States. A judge in New Mexico ordered Meta, which also owns Instagram and WhatsApp, to pay $25 billion after finding that the company had spent years lying to the public about how it handled Facebook user data. It was the largest fine Meta has ever faced over its business practices.