Meta fined $20m over misleading data protection claims

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Meta used the information, which had been anonymised and aggregated, for advertising and marketing activities such as identifying future acquisition targets and developing business strategies.

ACCC chair Gina Cass-Gottlieb said the commission was concerned consumers seeking to protect their privacy through a virtual private network “were not clearly told that they were actually facilitating the use of their data for Meta’s commercial benefit”.

“We believe Australian consumers should be able to make an informed choice about what happens to their data,” she said after the court decision on Wednesday.

While the app technically revealed the ways it would use consumer data, these disclosures were nestled in the terms of service and privacy policy, which Abraham found was “not sufficiently prominent or proximate” compared with the claims made about data protection in its app store listings.

However, she ultimately decided the assertions were “not deliberately misleading” and found no evidence that any senior management at Meta were involved in the contravening conduct.

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.

“Protecting the privacy and security of people’s data is fundamental to how Meta’s business works,” Meta said in a statement.

“Over 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.”

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The Federal Court’s 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.

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.

AAP