Italy’s data protection authority has fined Meta, the parent company of Facebook, 805 million euros ($880 million) for accessing users’ photos without their “specific” consent.
The regulator announced the penalty in a statement on Saturday.
According to the authority, Meta accessed photographs, videos and related metadata belonging to Italian users through the Facebook application for Android devices “without obtaining specific consent and without properly informing them”.
Meta has said it will appeal the decision.
A company spokesperson said “we strongly disagree” with the regulators’ assessment “and the disproportionate level of the fine”.
In late October, authorities in New Mexico ordered Meta to pay $25 billion for misleading the state’s residents for more than a decade over the use of their data.
That was a record fine for the company, which slammed it as a “tax” on freedom of expression.
Saturday’s fine is among the largest an Italian authority has ever imposed on a tech giant.
In 2021, Amazon received a fine of more than 1.1 billion euros for breaching competition law.
That sum was later reduced to 752 million euros on appeal.
The Italian penalty relates to Facebook’s gallery suggestions feature, which has been available since 2023.
The feature suggests photos and videos from a user’s phone gallery as ideas for posts while the user is browsing.
According to the regulator, Facebook asked for access to the gallery through a single authorisation valid for the entire app.
That request was preceded by a generic notice asking users to enable other features, which did not allow them to understand that they were also authorising suggestions from their gallery.
The regulator said Meta would now have to seek consent through a separate and specific request for the feature concerned.
Meta must also clearly signpost what the feature is used for, namely that it involves access to a user’s photo gallery, as well as how to disable it.
In determining the size of the fine, the authority said it took into account “the high number of people affected”, which it put at around 20 million Android users in Italy.
It also considered the duration of the infringement, “which is still ongoing for those who have not updated the app and for those who have already given their consent to the system”.
The authority further cited “Meta’s lack of cooperation during the investigation”.
The fine amounts to roughly 0.4 per cent of the group’s annual turnover, which hit $201 billion in 2025, with a net profit of $60.5 billion.
