Italy fines Meta $887 million; must disable feature by default in 60 days

Facebook and Instagram parent Meta has been fined in Italy. Italian regulators have fined the social media giant Meta $887 million for accessing Android smartphone users' photos and videos without their specific consent. The Italian regulator said that the company had accessed Android users' photographs and videos without obtaining their consent or informing them. The fine is among the largest an Italian authority has ever imposed on a technology company. Italy's Data Protection Authority said that Meta did not properly inform about 20 million smartphone users that it had access to their photos and videos via a feature of the Facebook app.

In its order, the regulator has given Meta 60 days to disable the feature by default and seek users' consent separately for access. The charge is related to a feature which suggests photos and videos from a user's phone gallery as ideas for posts. Facebook requested access to users' photo galleries through a single app-wide authorisation. According to the Italian regulator, a preceding notice did not make clear that this would also allow Facebook to generate suggestions based on photos in users' phone gallery. The regulator said that it took into account "the high number of people affected" and the fact it is "still ongoing for those who have not updated the app and for those who have already given their consent to the system". It also cited "Meta's lack of co-operation". The investigation, which began in 2025, did not cover the possible use of the content to train artificial intelligence models, a practice Meta denied, the authority said. It added that it reserved the right to assess separately a new feature, launched in 2026, that allows content from users' galleries to be processed in the cloud.

In October, Meta was hit with its largest fine ever for its business practices. A US judge in New Mexico ordered the company to pay $25 billion after it found that it had spent years lying to the public about how it handled Facebook user data. The ruling came in a case related to allegations that Cambridge Analytica, a British political consulting company involved in Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign, obtained data from millions of Facebook users without their consent. New Mexico had sued Meta, accusing it of lying to Facebook users in New Mexico about who had access to their data. "Facebook's wrongdoing — over the course of years and systematically broadcast to the public — goes to the heart of Facebook's core business practices," Judge Francis Mathew wrote in his order, which came more than three weeks after the verdict.