Meta received a fine of over $100 million in a five-year EU investigation of about 600 million Facebook passwords stored in plaintext.

Ireland’s data protection watchdog fined Meta Platforms after the Facebook and Instagram owner stored passwords of some social media users on its internal systems without proper safeguards.

Meta has been hit with yet another privacy penalty in Europe. The DPC opened a statutory inquiry into the incident in question in April 2019 under the bloc's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) after Meta,

Five years after the incident was uncovered and fixed, a European regulator is penalizing Facebook parent company Meta for violating the European Union's GDPR laws on data privacy.

Ireland's Data Protection Commission on Friday fined Meta more than $100 million for privacy law violations related to failing to properly encrypt and store passwords of the tech giant's users.

"It is widely accepted that user passwords should not be stored in plaintext, considering the risks of abuse that arise from persons accessing such data," said Deputy Commissioner

Facebook parent company Meta has been fined €91m (£75m) by the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) following an investigation into the storage of passwords. An inquiry was launched in April 2019 after Meta notified the DPC that it had inadvertently stored certain passwords of social media users on its internal systems without encryption.

Ireland’s data protection commission has fined Meta Platforms Inc.’s Irish branch €91 million ($102 million) following an investigation into password storing by the company, according to a statement by the regulator.