Australia Fines Meta $14 Million for Undisclosed Data Collection

Australia Fines Meta $14 Million , for Undisclosed Data Collection.

Australia's Federal Court ordered the Facebook owner to pay $14 million on July 26, Reuters reports.

.

Meta was also ordered to pay the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) nearly $270,000 in legal fees via subsidiaries Facebook Israel and Onavo, an app that has been discontinued.

.

Meta was also ordered to pay the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) nearly $270,000 in legal fees via subsidiaries Facebook Israel and Onavo, an app that has been discontinued.

.

The fine is related to privacy concerns surrounding Onavo, a virtual private network (VPN) service that advertised the safeguarding of personal information.

However, user data was collected by Facebook via Onavo for advertising purposes.

The failure to make sufficient disclosures ... may have deprived tens of thousands of Australian consumers of the opportunity to make an informed choice about the collection and use of their data before downloading and/or using Onavo Protect, Judge Wendy Abraham, via judgement.

Meta could have technically been fined billions of dollars since the app was downloaded by Australians 271,220 times, and a hefty fine was assigned to each breach.

But Judge Abraham found that "the contraventions can be characterized as a single course of conduct.".

According to Judge Abraham, the fine "carries with it a sufficient sting to ensure that the penalty amount is not such as to be regarded ... as simply an acceptable cost of doing business.".

In a statement, Meta said that it never intended to deceive users and has "built tools to give people more transparency and control over how their data is used." .

Last year, Meta raked in $116 billion in global revenues, Reuters reports.