Italy fines Meta €805m over Android photo and video access

Italy’s data protection authority imposed a €805 million ($887 million) fine on Meta on Sunday, saying the company’s Facebook app for Android reached Italian users’ photos, videos and related metadata without their specific consent, The Guardian reported. Meta said it would challenge the decision.

The penalty, issued by the Garante per la protezione dei dati personali, ranks among the largest Italy has handed to a technology company. Meta rejected the regulator’s reasoning and called the amount excessive.

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Key facts

• The Garante fined Meta €805 million ($887 million) over access to Android users’ photos and videos through the Facebook app.
• The regulator said the company did not obtain specific consent and did not properly inform users, and cited about 20 million Android users in Italy as affected.
• The fine equals roughly 0.4% of Meta’s annual turnover, which reached $201 billion in 2025 for a net profit of $60.5 billion, according to The Guardian.
• Meta said it “strongly disagree[s]” with the assessment and the “disproportionate level of the fine,” and will appeal.
• Crypto Briefing reported on November 14 that no official Garante announcement or release confirming the penalty had surfaced as of that date.

What the regulator says the app did

The case centers on Facebook’s gallery-suggestions feature, available since 2023, which proposes photos and videos from a phone’s gallery as ideas for posts. According to the Garante, Facebook asked for gallery access through a single authorisation covering the whole app, preceded by a generic notice about enabling other features. That setup, the regulator said, left users unable to understand they were also approving suggestions drawn from their gallery.

Meta will now be required to seek consent through a separate, specific request for the feature, make clear that it involves access to a user’s photo gallery, and explain how to turn it off. The authority said it weighed the high number of people affected and the duration of the infringement, which it described as still ongoing for users who have not updated the app and for those who have already consented to the system. It also cited Meta’s lack of cooperation during the investigation.

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A contested record

The reports on the penalty diverge on timing and confirmation. The Guardian, an Agence France-Presse report, published the fine as a formal decision on Sunday, November 15. Crypto Briefing had written a day earlier that the €805 million figure was circulating on social media without a paper trail, and that searches for an official announcement, regulatory filing or press release had come up empty as of November 14. It described the penalty then as reported rather than documented. The Guardian’s account supplies the regulator’s statement, the size of the fine relative to turnover, and Meta’s response.

The Italian action sits alongside other European cases touching how Meta obtains permission to use people’s data. Crypto Briefing noted Ireland’s Data Protection Commission fined Meta €1.2 billion in May 2023 over transfers of EU users’ data to the US, a decision Meta is appealing, and the European Commission fined the company €200 million in April 2025 under the Digital Markets Act over its “consent or pay” model. Italy’s own largest previous tech penalty was the more than €1.1 billion competition fine on Amazon in 2021, later cut to €752 million on appeal, The Guardian reported.

Why it matters

For Meta, the order adds a consent-focused remedy on top of fines already under appeal in Europe, and it applies to a feature used by a large share of Italy’s Android population. For app developers, the decision reinforces that bundling gallery access into a broad permission prompt is not enough; a separate, feature-specific consent step is the standard the Garante is enforcing.

What to watch

Meta’s appeal is the next formal step, and the company’s filings should set out its legal arguments against both the finding and the size of the penalty. How the Garante’s consent requirements are implemented in the Facebook Android app will show whether the remedy extends beyond Italy.

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StockPil Editorial

The StockPil Editorial desk covers stock markets, business, finance, forex and crypto. Our AI-assisted newsroom builds each article from published, linked sources, checks it for accuracy before it goes live, and our editors review published articles and correct anything that needs it.

Sources: The Guardian, Crypto Briefing