Big Tech

Lucinda Creighton: Meta’s €1.2bn fine is wholly appropriate, and not before time

The tech giant has promised over and over to do the right thing each time it is caught out misusing private data, but it never truly changes

Helen Dixon, Irish Data Protection Commissioner: because of the number of tech companies here, a disproportionate amount of regulatory policing is carried out by her office

The imposition last week of a whopping €1.2 billion fine on Meta, the parent company of Facebook, raised many eyebrows but should not come as a surprise. The fine was imposed under the provisions of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) five years after it came into effect across the European Union.

Since the arrival of the GDPR regime, some hefty fines have been imposed on US tech companies – but of the ten ...