Italy’s data protection agency has fined Meta Platforms €805 million after finding that a Facebook app feature accessed Android users’ photographs and videos without their consent or adequate information.
The authority said Meta used access to users’ personal galleries to suggest content they could share on Facebook. It is demanding that the company pay the sum in compensation.
Meta has been given 60 days to disable the feature by default and obtain users’ consent separately. The company was not immediately available for comment.
The investigation began in 2025 but did not examine whether the photographs and videos may have been used to train artificial intelligence models. The authority said Meta had denied that practice.
It also said it reserved the right to assess separately a new feature launched in 2026, which allows content from users’ galleries to be processed in the cloud.
The €805 million penalty is equivalent to about 0.47 per cent of Meta’s global revenue, according to the data protection agency.
