An Australian court ordered Meta Platforms to pay a fine of AUD (about $14 million) for covert collection of personal data through the Onavo app designed to protect privacy. Reuters reports.
The company remains a defendant in a suit by the Australian Information Commissioner over its ties to Cambridge Analytica.
The ruling concerns the VPN service that the company offered from early 2016 through late 2017.
Facebook (the former name of Meta) used Onavo to collect information about users’ location, time and frequency of use of other apps for advertising purposes.
According to the document, the fine could have been in the hundreds of billions, as Australians downloaded the app 271,220 times, and each breach of consumer protection law carried a fine of AUD 1.1 million.
In April 2022, former Meta employee and whistleblower Frances Haugen warned about the possibility of the company’s abuses being carried over into the developing metaverse.
Amnesty Internationalaccused Facebook of “aiding” the genocide of the Rohingya in Myanmar.