Italy fines Meta $887m over users' data access

Italy’s data protection authority has imposed a €805 million ($887 million) penalty on Meta, The Express Tribune reported, citing the agency’s findings that the company accessed Android users’ photos and videos without their permission or notice. The material was made available through a Facebook feature that recommended items from personal galleries for possible posting.

Meta has 60 days to switch the feature off by default and obtain consent separately, the authority said. The inquiry, opened in 2025, did not examine whether gallery content was used to train artificial intelligence models, a claim Meta has denied; regulators also reserved the option to review a cloud-processing feature introduced in 2026. The penalty amounts to about 0.47% of Meta’s global revenue.