Meta fined €265M over data scraping
€265M
≈ $286M at the time
Irish Data Protection Commission
Ireland / EU · 2022
Status: Under appeal
What happened
The DPC found that design failures allowed the scraping of roughly 533 million users' phone numbers and personal details, which were later leaked online.
How it affected users
Hundreds of millions of people were exposed to spam, phishing, and SIM-swap attacks after their contact details leaked.
Status timeline
Nov 25, 2022
Decision adopted, with a reprimand and an order to bring processing into compliance.
Sep 21, 2026
The DPC's fines register lists the fine as pending appeal; DPC fines are not payable until confirmed by a court.
Sources
- Irish DPC: decision in the Facebook data scraping inquiry (€265M)regulator
- Irish DPC fines register: status of each DPC fineregulator
Last verified 2026-10-15. Spotted an error? Report a correction.
Cite this entry
Deepak Gupta, "Meta fined €265M over data scraping," Tech Fines Directory, guptadeepak.com, 2022-11-25. https://guptadeepak.com/tech-fines/violation/meta-ireland-scraping-2022/