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Facebook is in major legal trouble after a court found the company guilty of illegally tracking its users’ online behavior without their consent.
The company was fined $22 million following the lawsuit by a South Korean privacy watchdog group. Facebook is also currently under investigation for at least six other similar privacy violations by the Irish Data Protection Commission.
This isn’t the first time that Mark Zuckerberg has been hit with historic fines. Instagram, which is owned by Meta, was recently fined more than $400 million for violating children’s privacy pursuant to the European Union’s data protection law.
In 2019, Zuckerberg agreed to pay a record-setting $5 billion fine to the Federal Trade Commission. Zuckerberg illegally violated user privacy by selling their personal data to third parties without their consent for years.
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In a statement Wednesday, South Korea’s Personal Information and Protection Commission said it fined Google $50 million and Facebook $22 million for illegally
The combined $72 million fine was the largest penalty ever levied in South Korea for privacy violations, according to the PIPC.
Both Google and Facebook collected private data from users for many years, the Korea Times reported Wednesday.
“Google has had Korean users give their consent without knowledge to such data collection by a default setting since at least 2016 while Meta, the operator of Facebook, has not informed or got consent from users since 2018, according to the watchdog,” the report said.
“As a result, over 82 percent of Google users and over 98 percent of Meta users in Korea have their user behavior data on platforms outside of Google and Meta exposed to their illegal data collection, the PIPC said.”
The commission ordered both Meta and Google to provide a clear and simple process for users to give consent over whether their personal information can