Italy’s data protection authority has fined Meta €805 million ($887 million) after finding that the Facebook app on Android phones read users’ photographs and videos without their specific consent. The Garante per la protezione dei dati personali announced the penalty on Saturday, saying the case centred on a feature that suggested pictures from people’s phone galleries as ideas for posts.
The feature, labelled “Get suggestions from your gallery when you browse Facebook”, has been switched on by default since 2023. The regulator said it gave Facebook access to photos, videos and their metadata on the phones of about 20 million Android users in Italy, without telling them properly or obtaining the separate consent the law requires.
Meta now has 60 days to switch the feature off by default and to ask users for a separate, specific consent, explaining clearly what the gallery access involves. Users who have not given that consent must not have the feature switched on for them, the authority said.
The investigation began in July 2025 after a complaint from a consumer protection centre in Bolzano. The Garante rejected Meta’s argument that the case should have been handled by Ireland’s Data Protection Commission, its lead regulator in the European Union, ruling instead under Article 122 of Italy’s Privacy Code, which implements the EU’s ePrivacy rules on accessing information stored on a person’s device.
The fine amounts to about 0.47 per cent of Meta’s global revenue, and it is reported to be the largest penalty the Garante has ever imposed. The authority said the investigation did not examine whether gallery content was used to train artificial intelligence models, a practice Meta denies, and it reserved the right to assess separately a newer feature, launched in 2026, that processes gallery content in the cloud.
Meta was not immediately available for comment, Reuters reported.
Sources: Reuters, “Italy fines Meta $887 million over Android users’ data access”, https://www.reuters.com/world/italy-fines-meta-887-million-over-android-users-data-access-2026-11-14/ ; Garante per la protezione dei dati personali, “Facebook: il Garante Privacy sanziona Meta per 805 milioni di euro”, https://www.garanteprivacy.it/web/guest/home/docweb/-/docweb-display/docweb/10321080
