Italy’s Garante per la protezione dei dati personali fined Meta Platforms Ireland Limited 805 million euros on Saturday. Through the Facebook app for Android, the authority found, Meta accessed photographs, videos and their metadata stored on Italian users’ smartphones without obtaining specific consent and without adequately informing them, in breach of Article 122 of the Italian privacy code, which implements the European ePrivacy directive.
The case concerns the feature “Get suggestions from the gallery when you browse on Facebook”, available since 2023, which proposes photos and videos from the phone gallery as content to post. The investigation opened in July 2025 after a report from a consumer centre in Bolzano. The Garante said gallery access was requested through a single authorisation covering the whole app, preceded by a generic notice, and that the feature was preset to active. About 20 million Android users in Italy were affected, and the fine equals about 0.47 percent of the group’s global revenue.
Within 60 days Meta must seek consent through a distinct, specific request, keep the feature disabled by default even for users who already authorised access, tell the Garante within 30 days what it has started and within 90 days what it has adopted. The proceeding did not cover any use of the content to train artificial intelligence models, which Meta denies, and the authority reserved separate checks on a 2026 feature that processes gallery content in the cloud.