Italian regulators fined Facebook parent company Meta 805 million euros ($880 million) for accessing users' photos without their "specific" consent, the country's data protection authority said on Saturday.
Through the Facebook application for Android devices, Meta accessed photographs, videos and related metadata belonging to Italian users "without obtaining specific consent and without properly informing them", the authority said in a statement.
The fine follows an investigation by Italy’s data protection authority into a Facebook feature introduced in 2023. The feature, called “Get suggestions from your gallery while browsing Facebook”, allows the platform to suggest photos and videos stored on users’ phones as potential posts.
The regulator found that Facebook requested a single, general permission to access users’ photo galleries, without clearly explaining that this also enabled the gallery-suggestion feature. The function was activated by default, and the permission could allow the app to access the entire photo archive on an Android device, including associated metadata.
The investigation began in July 2025 after a complaint from a consumer protection group. Italy’s regulator ruled that Meta breached privacy laws by accessing users’ photos without informed consent, rejecting the company’s argument that Ireland should handle the case.
Meta has 60 days to introduce a separate consent request and disable the feature by default. The authority said the fine reflected the scale of the violation, which affected around 20 million Android users in Italy.
