Italy fines Meta $887m for accessing Android users’ photos and videos

Italy's data protection agency has imposed a hefty fine of €805 million ($887 million) on Facebook's parent company Meta for accessing users' photos without their explicit consent. The agency found that through its Facebook application for Android devices, Meta accessed photos, videos, and related metadata belonging to Italian users "without obtaining specific consent and without properly informing them".

Meta plans to appeal the decision, stating that they "strongly disagree" with the assessment by the regulators and find the "disproportionate level of the fine" unacceptable.

The fine represents among the largest penalties ever imposed on a tech giant by an Italian authority. In 2021, Amazon received a more substantial fine of over €1.1 billion for breaching competition law, though it was later reduced to €752 million on appeal. This 2023 fine highlights Meta's gallery suggestions feature, introduced in 2023, which suggests photos and videos from a user's phone gallery as ideas for posts while they browse.

However, the regulator criticized Meta for requesting access to the gallery via a single authorization tied to the entire app, with a generic notice that failed to inform users about the gallery suggestions. As a result, Meta will now need to seek consent through a separate, specific request and clearly indicate what the feature entails and how users can disable it.

The regulator considered various factors when determining the fine's size, including the high number of people affected—around 20 million Android users in Italy—and the ongoing infringement, which persists for those who haven't updated the app or opted-in to the system. The fine equates to roughly 0.4% of Meta's annual turnover, which reached $201 billion in 2025, based on a net profit of $60.5 billion.