Facebook is once again on the chopping block after the Irish Data Protection Commission opened a new investigation into the tech company over security lapses and privacy breaches.
The firm could be charged under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) Law and this could mean a fine of up to 20 million Euros around Ksh2.3 Billion, or 4pc of global turnover.
In a statement, the data privacy watchdog said “The Data Protection Commission was notified by Facebook that it had discovered that hundreds of millions of user passwords, relating to users of Facebook, Facebook Lite and Instagram, were stored by Facebook in plain text format in its internal servers,”
Even after this findings, Facebook went ahead to justify its actions by saying the passwords āwere not internally abused or improperly accessed,ā The statement, according to the watchdog shows how much the social media company underestimated the number of accounts affected.
The DPC says the investigation will be concluded in the last quarter of the year, considering the extensiveness of the matter.
Potential Charges
Facebook, however, is not only facing the DPC charges with regards to privacy issues. The Canadian Privacy Commissioner has said it plans to take Facebook to court for what it terms as āserious contraventionsā of Canadian privacy law. Facebook is said to have shared over 600,000 profiles of Canadian citizens in the Cambridge Analytica Scandal.
New York attorney general Letitia James has launched an investigation on Facebook over āunauthorized collectionā of 1.5 million use email addresses used by Facebook for profile verification.
āIt is time Facebook is held accountable for how it handles consumersā personal information. Facebook has repeatedly demonstrated a lack of respect for consumersā information while at the same time profiting from mining that data.ā Said the attorney
