Australia fines Facebook Owner Meta $14mn for Undisclosed Data Collection

New Delhi, 26th July 2023: A court in Australia ordered Facebook owner Meta Platforms to pay A$20 million ($14 million) in fines for gathering user data through a smartphone app marketed as a tool to preserve privacy without disclosing its operations.

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), who launched the civil complaint, was also ordered by Australia’s Federal Court to pay A$400,000 in legal fees to Meta, through its subsidiaries Facebook Israel and the now-discontinued app Onavo.

The fine closes one thread of Meta’s legal troubles in Australia relating to its treatment of user data after a global crisis arose over its use of data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica in the 2016 U.S. election.

Meta is still being sued in civil court in Australia by the Office of the Information Commissioner for its dealings with Cambridge Analytica.

The decision was handed out on Wednesday in regard to Onavo, a virtual private network (VPN) service offered by the corporation formerly known as Facebook from early 2016 to late 2017. VPNs mask an internet user’s identity by assigning an alternative Internet address to their computer.

However, the judge Wendy Abraham stated in a written judgement that Facebook used Onavo to collect users’ location, time, and frequency utilising other smartphone apps and websites they visited for its own advertising objectives.

Abraham wrote, “The failure to make sufficient disclosures … may have deprived tens of thousands of Australian consumers of the opportunity to make an informed choice about the collection and use of their data before downloading and/or using Onavo Protect.”

The court might have punished Meta hundreds of billions of dollars because Australians downloaded the software 271,220 times, and each violation of consumer law entailed a A$1.1 million fine, but “the contraventions can be characterised as a single course of conduct,” she noted.

She further wrote that both parties agreed on the fine, but, “carries with it a sufficient sting to ensure that the penalty amount is not such as to be regarded … as simply an acceptable cost of doing business.”

Meta, which had $116 billion in global revenue last year, said in a statement that the ACCC had accepted it had never attempted to mislead customers and that “over the last several years we have built tools to give people more transparency and control over how their data is used.”

ACCC Chair Gina Cass-Gottlieb stated in a statement that Australian customers should be able to make educated decisions about what happens to their data based on clear facts.