Italy imposes record $887 million fine on Meta over suspected access to users’ photos and videos without consent

Following an investigation launched in 2025, Italy’s data protection authority announced this Saturday that it had fined tech giant Meta $887 million. The company is suspected of accessing Android users’ photos and videos without first obtaining their consent.

The investigation focused on a feature in the Facebook app that, according to authorities, allowed Meta to access users’ private photo galleries. The feature suggested photos and videos stored on users’ devices for them to post on the platform.

Reuters reports that the authority believes users were not given adequate information about this access and had not given their consent.

Meta has 60 days to change how the feature works. Within that period, the company must disable it by default and obtain users’ specific consent to access material in their galleries.

The investigation did not examine whether the photos and videos may have been used to train artificial intelligence models. Meta has denied doing so.

Meanwhile, the Italian authority said it reserves the right to open a separate investigation into another feature, introduced in 2026, that allows content from users’ galleries to be processed in the cloud.