SYDNEY - An Australian court ordered Facebook owner Meta Platforms to pay fines totalling A$20 million (S$17.93 million) for collecting user data through a smartphone application advertised as a way to protect privacy without disclosing its actions. Australia’s Federal...
However, Facebook used Onavo to collect users’ location, time and frequency using other smartphone apps, and websites they visited for its own advertising purposes, Judge Wendy Abraham said in a written judgment.
“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,” Ms Abraham wrote. She added that the court could have fined Meta hundreds of billions of dollars since Australians downloaded the app 271,220 times and each breach of consumer law carried a A$1.1 million fine, but “the contraventions can be characterised as a single course of conduct”.
The fine was agreed by both sides 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”, she wrote. Meta, which made global revenues of US$116 billion in 2022, said in a statement that the judge had acknowledged it never sought to mislead customers, and “over the last several years we have built tools to give people more transparency and control over how their data is used”.Get The New Paper on your phone with the free TNP app. Download from the
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