The Irish DPA is currently investigating seven cases against Facebook. Altogether there are 16 cases against technology companies such as Twitter, Apple and Linkedin, said the data protection officer Helen Dixon in a published on Friday interview with the financial service Bloomberg.
That companies would have tens and hundreds of millions of users could ultimately be reflected in the amount of fines, she said. Under the EU General Data Protection Regulation, penalties can reach four percent of a company’s annual turnover. To be able to threaten with a very high penalty is “a very useful tool,” said the data protector.
Dixon did not count the individual Facebook researches. A process known after the disclosure of a security breach involving up to 50 million users was known. Facebook corrected the number of potentially affected people to 30 million. Another is a software bug that gave app developers wider access to user photos.