Ireland’s data authority penalised WhatsApp €225 million (£193 million) for violating privacy standards. It’s the highest penalties the Irish Data Protection Commission has ever imposed, and the second-highest under EU GDPR standards.
WhatsApp has stated that the fine is “very unreasonable” and that it will file an appeal. Nonetheless, the Irish amount is much lower than the Luxembourg privacy agency’s record $886.6 million fine imposed on Amazon in July.
In a statement, the Irish authority said, “This includes information supplied to data subjects about the processing of information between WhatsApp and other Facebook entities.”
The issues revolved around whether WhatsApp complied with EU data transparency rules in 2018. According to Ireland’s Data Privacy Commissioner (DPC), which is the lead data privacy regulator for Facebook within the European Union, the issues revolved around whether WhatsApp complied with EU data transparency rules in 2018.
The questions at hand were extremely technical, such as whether WhatsApp provided users with appropriate information about how their data was processed and if its privacy policies were clear enough.
