Italy Fines Meta €805 Million Over Facebook Access to Users’ Photos Without Consent

Italy fines Meta €805 million ($887 million) after the country’s data protection authority found the Facebook app on Android phones had accessed users’ photographs and videos without their specific consent, the regulator announced on Saturday.

The penalty, handed down by the Garante per la protezione dei dati personali, is among the largest fines an Italian authority has ever imposed on a technology company. It centres on a Facebook feature that drew on the personal photo galleries of around 20 million Android users in Italy.

FAKTA

• Fine: €805 million (about $887 million)
• Authority: Italy’s data protection authority, the Garante
• Company: Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook
• Users affected: around 20 million Android users in Italy
• Deadline: 60 days to switch the feature off by default and seek separate consent
• Announced: Saturday, 14 November 2026

Italy fines Meta: what the Facebook feature did

At the centre of the case is a feature called “Get suggestions from your gallery while browsing Facebook”, which has been available since 2023. It suggests photos and videos from a user’s phone gallery as ideas for posts while they are browsing Facebook.

According to the regulator, Facebook requested access to the gallery through a single authorisation covering the whole app, preceded by a generic notice asking users to enable other features. That did not make clear to users that they were also authorising suggestions from their gallery, the authority said.

The app accessed photographs, videos and related metadata stored on Italian users’ smartphones “without obtaining specific consent and without properly informing them”, the Garante said in a statement.

A smartphone showing the Facebook app with a grid of photos from the phone gallery. The Italian regulator found the app accessed users’ galleries without their specific consent. Photo: Watan News

Around 20 million users affected

In setting the size of the fine, the authority said it took into account the high number of people affected — around 20 million Android users in Italy — and the duration of the infringement, which it said is still ongoing for people who have not updated the app and for those who have already given their consent to the system.

The authority also cited what it called Meta’s lack of cooperation during the investigation, which began in 2025 after a complaint from a consumer protection centre in Bolzano. The fine amounts to about 0.47 per cent of Meta’s global revenue, the authority said.

What Meta must do now

Meta has 60 days to disable the gallery-suggestion feature by default and to seek consent through a separate and specific request that explains what the feature is used for, that it involves access to the user’s photo gallery, and how to disable it.

Meta was not immediately available for comment when the fine was announced, and the company may appeal the decision.

AI training not part of the case

The investigation did not examine whether content taken from users’ galleries was used to train artificial intelligence models, a practice Meta has denied. The authority said it reserved the right to assess separately a newer feature, launched in 2026, that allows gallery content to be processed in the cloud.

A growing bill for Meta

The Italian fine lands weeks after authorities in New Mexico ordered Meta to pay $25 billion for having misled the state’s residents for more than a decade over the use of their data — a record penalty for the company, which described it as a “tax” on freedom of expression.

For comparison, Amazon received a fine of more than €1.1 billion from Italian regulators in 2021 for breaching competition law, a sum later reduced to €752 million on appeal.

More technology news is available on Watan News.