Italian regulators fined Facebook parent company Meta $880 million for accessing users’ photos without their “specific” consent, the country’s data protection authority said on Saturday. Through the Facebook application for Android devices, Meta accessed photographs, videos and related metadata belonging to Italian users “without obtaining specific consent and without adequately informing them,” the authority said in a statement. Saturday’s latest fine is among the largest ever imposed on a tech giant by an Italian authority. In 2021, Amazon was fined more than 1.1 billion euros, or about $1.2 billion, for violating competition law. That sum was later reduced to 752 million euros, or about $829 million, on appeal. Meta can also appeal the latest fine. The technology company had not responded to a request for comment as of Saturday afternoon. Meta has been fined or forced to pay settlements over privacy issues. In September, a New Mexico judge ordered Meta to pay $25 billion to the state after a jury found that the social media company misled consumers for years about its data privacy policies. The company said it disagreed with the jury’s verdict. In:
