Meta fined €805 million in Italy over alleged access to users’ phone galleries

Italy's data protection authority fined Meta Platforms Inc. €805 million ($887 million) on November 14, Saturday. It found the Facebook app for Android accessed users' photos, videos and metadata without their specific consent.

According to Italian media, Garante Meta used apps to read media stored on Italian users' phones without properly informing them, and it affected roughly 20 million people. The fine equals about 0.47% of Meta's worldwide turnover and is the largest the Italian regulator has ever imposed.

The case centres on a feature that suggested photos and videos from a user's gallery as post ideas while they browsed Facebook. The Garante said the feature was enabled by default and that the consent prompt was too generic for users to understand what they were permitting.

According to the BBC, Meta is planning to appeal the judgement. “We strongly disagree with the [regulator's] assessment of the facts, its application of the law, and the disproportionate level of the fine.”

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"This is a straightforward feature which helps people post photos and videos to Facebook. People must give permission on their device before it can operate, and they can change this permission at any time via their settings," said a Meta spokesperson.

The regulator said the practice violates Italian law implementing the EU's ePrivacy directive. Meta had challenged Italy's jurisdiction, but the Garante said ePrivacy rules do not provide for the "one-stop-shop" mechanism that would send the case to Ireland's regulator.

The authority cited the scale of the case, a 2019 sanction against the company and limited cooperation during the investigation as factors in setting the fine. Meta has 60 days to ask Italian users for separate, specific consent for the feature.

The investigation began in 2025. It did not examine whether the photos were used to train artificial intelligence models. The authority also said it reserves the right to conduct a separate investigation into a new feature launched in 2026 that allows content from users’ galleries to be processed in the cloud.

This is the second consecutive month Meta has been fined. Last month, Meta was hit with its largest-ever fine of $25 billion, after a US judge in New Mexico found that Meta was lying to its customers for years about how it handled Facebook data.