A court in Australia has ordered Facebook owner Meta Platforms to pay fines totaling 20 million Australian dollars ($13.5m) for collecting user data through a smartphone application without disclosing its actions.
Australia’s Federal Court on Wednesday also ordered Meta, through its subsidiaries Facebook Israel and the now-discontinued app, Onavo, to pay 400,000 Australian dollars ($270,631) in legal costs to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC).
The fine wraps up one strand of Meta’s legal issues in Australia, related to its handling of user information since a global scandal erupted over its use of data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica in the 2016 United States election.
Meta still faces a civil court action by Australia’s Office of the Information Commissioner over its dealings with Cambridge Analytica in Australia.
Wednesday’s judgment was about a virtual private network (VPN) service the company then called Facebook offered from early 2016 to late 2017, Onavo, which it advertised as a way to keep personal information safe.
However, Facebook used Onavo to collect users’ location, time, and frequency using other smartphone apps and websites they visited for its advertising purposes, Justice Wendy Abraham said in a written judgment.
“The failure to make sufficient disclosures … may have deprived tens of thousands of Australian consumers of the opportunity to make an informed choice about the collection and use of their data before downloading and/or using Onavo Protect,” Abraham wrote.
She added that the court could have fined Meta hundreds of billions of dollars since Australians downloaded the app 271,220 times and each breach of consumer law carried a fine of 1.1 million Australian dollars ($743,721), but “the contraventions can be characterized as a single course of conduct”.
The fine was agreed by both sides but “carries with it a sufficient sting to ensure that the penalty amount is not such as to be regarded … as simply an acceptable cost of doing business”, she wrote.
Meta, which made global revenues of $116bn last year, said in a statement that the ACCC had acknowledged it never sought to mislead customers, and that “over the last several years we have built tools to give people more transparency and control over how their data is used”.
In a statement, ACCC Chair Gina Cass-Gottlieb said Australian consumers should be able to make an informed choice about what happens to their data based on clear information.