Meta cops $20 million fine for misleading ads about site security
Social media giant Meta and subsidiaries have copped $20 million in fines after an app that claimed to protect personal information was found to have collected user data for commercial purposes.
Onavo Protect was a free mobile app made available by Meta that provided a virtual private network service which claimed to ākeep you and your data safe onlineā and give users āpeace of mind when you browseā according to its App Store listing.
The app also told users their data would not be used for any purpose other than providing Onavo Protectās products.
The Australian Consumer and Competition Commission took Facebook Israel Ltd and its subsidiaries to court in 2020 after it found Meta had collected significant amounts of user information for its own commercial benefit between February 2016 and October 2017.
In a judgment handed down on Wednesday, Federal Court Justice Wendy Abraham found the companyās conduct was likely to mislead or deceive Australian consumers and fined the social media conglomerate $20m ā $10m to Facebook and $10m to Onavo.
Meta also agreed to pay $400,000 for the ACCCās legal costs.
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The consumer watchdog found Onavo Protect tracked usersā online activity, taking records of every app they accessed and the exact number of seconds spent on each app, alongside information about their device and location data based on IP addresses.
If Onavo Protect users had a Facebook account, Meta could combine the data from both sources and learn ānearly everything they are doing on their mobile deviceā.
Meta used this information, which had been anonymised and aggregated, for advertising and marketing activities like identifying future acquisition targets and developing business strategies.
While the app technically revealed the ways they would use consumer data, these disclosures were nestled in the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy, which Justice Abraham found was ānot sufficiently prominent or proximateā compared to the claims made about data protection in its app store listings.
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However, she ultimately decided the assertions were ānot deliberately misleadingā and found no evidence that any senior management at Meta were involved in the contravening conduct.
Following the judgment, a spokesperson from Meta said user data protection was important to the company and maintained Onavo Protect had properly functioned as an online security tool.
āProtecting the privacy and security of peopleās data is fundamental to how Metaās business works,ā Meta said in a statement.
āOver the last several years, we have built tools to give people more transparency and control over how their data is used, and we design every new product and feature with privacy in mind.ā
The Federal Courtās decision comes almost a year after Meta agreed to pay $1.1 billion for providing political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica access to data from as many as 87 million Facebook users, on top of previous billion-dollar penalties for that data breach.
The Australian Information Commissioner earlier this year sued the company for breaching the privacy of 311,000 Australian users.
The Onavo Protect app is no longer available on the App Store or Google Play Store.
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