South Korea fined Meta $15.67M for illegally collecting and sharing Facebook users

South Korea fined Meta $15.67M for illegally collecting and sharing Facebook users’ sensitive data, including political views and sexual orientation, with advertisers.

South Korea’s data privacy watchdog, Personal Information Protection Commission (PIPC), fined Meta 21.62 billion won ($15.67 million) for illegally collecting sensitive personal information from Facebook users, including data about their political views and sexual orientation, and sharing it with advertisers without their explicit consent.

South Korea’s PIPC stated Meta shared sensitive data like religion, politics, and same-sex marital status of 980,000 Facebook users with 4,000 advertisers. The advertisers used this data for customized services.

The investigation conducted by South Korean authorities also included complaints of data leaks and Meta’s refusal to provide personal information access without justification.

“The investigation found that Meta had previously collected sensitive information, such as religious and political views and same-sex marital status, of approximately 980,000 domestic users through Facebook profiles, and provided this information to advertisers, which was used by approximately 4,000 advertisers. Specifically, it was found that behavioral information, such as the pages that users ‘liked’ on Facebook and the ads they clicked on, was analyzed to create and operate advertising topics related to sensitive information (specific religions, homosexuality, transgenders, North Korean defectors, etc.).” reads the press release published by PIC.

“The Personal Information Protection Act stipulates that information on thoughts, beliefs, political views, sexual life, etc. is sensitive information that must be strictly protected, and in principle restricts its processing.”

During the investigation, Meta stopped collecting sensitive data and deleted related advertising topics relying on the unauthorized collected data. However, Meta refused users’ requests to access personal information, claiming it wasn’t required under the Personal Information Protection Act. The Commission, citing legal provisions allowing inspection of personal data handling, found no justification for Meta’s refusal.

According to PIPC, Meta also failed to secure an unused account recovery page, allowing hackers to use fake IDs to reset passwords and access the personal data of 10 Korean users.

“Accordingly, the Personal Information Protection Commission imposed fines and penalties on Meta for violating the provisions of the Protection Act related to restrictions on the processing of sensitive information, while issuing a corrective order to establish a legal basis for the processing of sensitive information, take measures to ensure safety, and faithfully respond to users’ requests to view their personal information.” concludes the press release. “The significance of this investigation and disposition lies in the fact that it ensures that overseas companies operating global services must comply with the obligations stipulated in our protection laws when processing sensitive information, as well as sufficiently guarantee the rights of data subjects, such as providing access to personal information.”

Meta’s South Korean office told the Associated Press it would “carefully review” the commission’s decision.

In September 2024, the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) fined Meta Platforms Ireland Limited (MPIL) €91 million ($100 million) for storing the passwords of hundreds of millions of users in plaintext, violating data protection regulations.

In 2019, Meta disclosed that it had inadvertently stored some users’ passwords in plaintext on its internal systems, without encrypting them.

“As part of a routine security review in January, we found that some user passwords were being stored in a readable format within our internal data storage systems. This caught our attention because our login systems are designed to mask passwords using techniques that make them unreadable.” reported Meta. “We have fixed these issues and as a precaution we will be notifying everyone whose passwords we have found were stored in this way.”

The company pointed out that these passwords were only visible to people inside of Facebook and found no evidence that anyone internally abused or improperly accessed them. 

Meta estimated that the incident impacted hundreds of millions of Facebook Lite users, tens of millions of other Facebook users, and tens of thousands of Instagram users.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, privacy)