Italy’s data protection agency has fined Facebook parent company Meta 805 million euros ($887 million) for accessing users’ photos without their specific consent.
Through the Facebook application for Android devices, Meta accessed photographs, videos and associated metadata belonging to Italian users “without obtaining specific consent and without properly informing them,” the authority said in a statement.
Meta said she would appeal the decision. A company spokesperson said “we strongly disagree” with the regulators’ assessment “and the disproportionate level of the fine.”
In late October, New Mexico authorities ordered Meta to pay $25 billion for misleading state residents for more than a decade about the use of their data — a record fine for the company, which called it a “tax” on free speech.
Saturday’s latest fine is one of the largest an Italian authority has imposed on a technology company.
In 2021, Amazon was fined more than €1.1 billion for violating competition law.
This sum was later reduced to 752 million euros on appeal.
The Italian sanction imposed on Facebook concerns its gallery suggestions feature, available since 2023, which suggests photos and videos from a user’s phone gallery as post ideas while browsing.
According to the Italian regulator, Facebook requested access to the gallery through a single authorization valid for the entire application, preceded by a generic notification requesting the activation of other features, which did not allow users to understand that they were also authorizing suggestions from their gallery.
The regulator said Meta would now have to seek consent through a separate, specific request for the relevant functionality and clearly state what it is for, namely that it involves access to a user’s photo gallery, as well as how to deactivate it.
To determine the amount of the fine, the authority said it took into account “the high number of people affected” – around 20 million Android users in Italy – and the duration of the infringement, “which is still ongoing for those who have not updated the application and for those who have already given consent to the system”.
The authority also cited “Meta’s lack of cooperation during the investigation.”
It imposed a fine equivalent to around 0.4% of the group’s annual turnover, which reached $201 billion in 2025, for a net profit of $60.5 billion.
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