Big tech fines in 2022

The Cyberspace Administration of China imposed a sweeping penalty on Didi for extensive data-security and personal-information violations following a year-long investigation.

The DPC found that Instagram business accounts publicly exposed children's phone numbers and email addresses by default.

Forty US states settled claims that Google misled users into believing location tracking was off while it kept collecting location data through other settings such as Web & App Activity. It was the largest multistate privacy settlement at the time.

Russia imposed a turnover-based fine on Google for repeatedly failing to delete content the government deemed banned, following an earlier 2021 penalty. Enforcement and collection were complicated after 2022, and the amounts are largely uncollected in practice.

The DPC found that design failures allowed the scraping of roughly 533 million users' phone numbers and personal details, which were later leaked online.

The CNIL found that Google made refusing cookies far harder than accepting them, a dark-pattern design that did not amount to valid consent.

The Competition Commission of India fined Google for abusing Android's dominance through forced pre-installs and anti-forking restrictions on device makers.

The FTC and DOJ penalised Twitter, now X, for using phone numbers and email addresses collected for account security, such as two-factor authentication, to target advertising.

In a companion decision, the CCI fined Google for forcing app developers to use Google Play Billing and its associated commission.

The CNIL fined Microsoft for depositing advertising cookies on bing.com without consent and for making it harder to refuse cookies than to accept them.

The Dutch ACM levied ten consecutive weekly penalties of €5M after Apple repeatedly failed to comply with an order to let dating apps use alternative payment systems.

The DPC fined Meta over a series of twelve data breaches in 2018, finding it had failed to have appropriate technical and organisational measures in place.