Following a four-year investigation, South Korea's Personal Information Protection Commission concluded that Meta unlawfully collected sensitive information about around 980,000 Facebook users, including their religion, political views and whether they were in same-sex unions, from July 2018 to March 2022.
The commission said Meta amassed sensitive information by analyzing the pages the Facebook users liked or the advertisements they clicked on, categorizing ads to identify users interested in specific religions, same-sex and transgender issues, and issues related to North Korean escapees.
"While Meta collected this sensitive information and used it for individualized services, they made only vague mentions of this use in their data policy and did not obtain specific consent," Lee said.
Lee also said Meta put the privacy of Facebook users at risk by failing to implement basic security measures such as removing or blocking inactive pages.
Collection
[
|
...
]