Overview
- Italy’s data protection authority announced the €805 million penalty on Saturday, November 14, saying about 20 million Italian Android users were affected and rejecting Meta’s claim that Ireland should handle the complaint.
- The ruling targets the “get suggestions from gallery when browsing Facebook” feature, which the regulator found was enabled by default and relied on a single, app‑wide permission preceded by a generic notice that did not explain gallery access.
- The Garante gave Meta 60 days to require a separate, specific consent screen for the feature and to keep the suggestion tool disabled by default, and it set short reporting deadlines for progress updates to the authority.
- Meta said it will appeal, saying it disagrees with the findings and the fine, and the proceedings did not decide whether gallery content was used to train AI — the regulator reserved separate review of a 2026 cloud‑processing feature.
- The authority calculated the fine as roughly 0.4–0.47% of Meta’s global turnover and said it weighed the scale of users affected, the duration of the practice, limited cooperation and a prior 2019 sanction, highlighting growing EU scrutiny of device‑level consent practices.