Data Protection Commission announces statutory inquiry into Facebook

The Irish Data Protection Commission announced in a press release on  December 14, 2018 that it had initiated a statutory inquiry into Facebook.

Due to the frequent, especially in the recent past, data breaches of the American company and the total number of reported data breaches since the GDPR came into force on May 25, 2018, the Irish Data Protection Commission has initiated an investigation into compliance with the relevant provisions of the GDPR against Facebook.

In recent weeks, reports of renewed breaches of data protection by Facebook have continued.

Most recently, it became known that the Italian competition authority AGCM had imposed a fine of 10 million euros on Facebook because the company had passed on data to other platforms without the express consent of the users and that a bug in the programming interface for picture processing led to third-party apps having access to pictures of 6.8 million Facebook users, some of which had not even been published by the users.