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Popular vid-photo sharing platform, Instagram has been slammed €405m by the Ireland’s data privacy regulator sharing the e-mail addresses and phone numbers of children who signed up to the social network as a business or a creator.
According to reports, Instagram had automatically shared the contact details of children if they were operating a business or creator account until last summer.
It is believed that this practice has impacted millions of children around the European Union, but no concrete figures have been provided by the DPC. By sharing children’s contact details, it meant they were contactable by adults.
The Irish watchdog’s investigation centered on how Instagram exposed the personal details of users ages 13 to 17, including email addresses and phone numbers.
The minimum age for Instagram users is 13.
The spokesman for Ireland’s Data Protection, who is the lead regulator of Instagram’s parent company Meta Platforms Inc said they adopted the final decision last Friday and it does contain a fine of 405 million euro.
“We adopted our final decision last Friday and it does contain a fine of €405m,” said the spokesperson for Ireland’s data protection commissioner (DPC), the lead regulator of Instagram’s parent company Meta Platforms.
“Full details of the decision will be published next week,” he said.
The penalty is the second-biggest issued under the European Union’s stringent privacy rules, after Luxembourg’s regulators fined Amazon 746 million euros last year.
The spokesperson said Instagram disagrees with how the fine was calculated and is carefully reviewing the decision.
The DPC regulates Facebook, Apple, Google and other technology giants due to the location of their EU headquarters in Ireland. It has opened over a dozen investigations into Meta companies, including Facebook and WhatsApp.
In 2021, WhatsApp was fined a record €225m for failing to conform with EU data rules in 2018.
The Irish regulator completed a draft ruling in the Instagram investigation in December and shared it with other EU regulators under the bloc’s “one stop shop” system of regulating large multinationals.
Instagram updated its settings over a year ago and has since released new features to keep teens safe and their information private, the Meta spokesperson said.
