Instagram hit with record $591m fine for its treatment of children’s data

Meta was fined €405 million ($591 million) for breaking European Union data privacy laws for its treatment of children’s data on Instagram, the latest in a series of steps by authorities in Europe and the United States to crack down on what information is collected and shared by companies about young people online.

Ireland’s Data Protection Commission said it decided September 2 to impose what would be one of the largest fines to date under the General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, the 4-year-old European data privacy law that has been criticised for being weakly enforced.

Policymakers are attempting to better safeguard children’s data generated on social media, online video games and other internet services. California lawmakers last week passed a law that would require many online services to increase protections for children. Britain passed a similar law last year.

European laws give children’s data special protections. In 2020, Ireland’s Data Protection Commission began investigating Instagram for making the accounts of children ages 13-17 set to public by default, and for allowing teenagers with business accounts on Instagram, many of them aspiring influencers, to make public their email addresses and phone numbers.

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Graham Doyle, a spokesperson for the Irish Data Protection Commission, confirmed that Instagram had been fined and said more details about the decision would be released next week. Politico first reported the fine.

Meta said it disagreed with the decision and planned to appeal, setting up what could be a lengthy legal process. The company said the inquiry focused on old settings that were updated more than a year ago, and that it has since added several more features to improve the safety of young users.

“Anyone under 18 automatically has their account set to private when they join Instagram, so only people they know can see what they post, and adults can’t message teens who don’t follow them,” the company said in an emailed statement.

The fine far exceeds any others to date by Ireland against Meta, reflecting regulators’ broader efforts to address the potentially harmful effect that social media and the internet have on young people.