Italy fines Meta 805 million euros, about $887 million, after finding that the Facebook app for Android opened Italian users’ photo galleries without their specific consent. The Italian Data Protection Authority, known as the Garante, announced the penalty on Saturday, November 14.
The Garante said the app had “accessed photos, videos and associated metadata stored on Italian users’ smartphones without specific consent and without informing them”. The case turns on a feature called “Get suggestions from gallery when browsing Facebook”, available since 2023 and switched on by default. While a person browses Facebook, the feature offers photos and videos from the phone gallery as ideas for posts.
The authority estimated that about 20 million Android users in Italy could have been affected. The Italy fines Meta penalty is by far the largest the Garante has imposed, and amounts to about 0.47 percent of Meta’s global turnover.
Italy fines Meta over how permission was collected
The Garante said the problem was not the idea of suggestions. It was the way permission was collected. Access was requested through a single permission for the whole app, covering several features with different needs. That request was preceded by a generic warning about enabling other features, which did not let a user understand that agreement also covered the phone’s photo gallery suggestions.
“If granted in full, this type of permission allows the app to read the device’s entire photo archive, usually permanently, without the user or the authorities being able to verify which information is actually being used,” the Garante said in its statement.
In the Italy fines Meta case, the authority found a breach of Article 122 of the Italian Privacy Code, which implements the European Union ePrivacy Directive. That law requires free and informed consent before access to information stored on a device. The Garante said the legislation treats information stored on smartphones as part of a person’s private sphere, and that accessing it requires freely given and informed consent even where the company does not show that the information was sent elsewhere or that the user suffered clear harm.
Italy fines Meta after rejecting the Ireland argument
Meta argued that Ireland should handle the case, because its main European base is in Dublin. The Garante rejected that objection. It said ePrivacy rules do not provide for the one-stop-shop mechanism that routes most GDPR cases through a lead regulator in Ireland, so Rome could decide the case itself.
The Italy fines Meta inquiry began in July 2025 after a complaint from the Centro Tutela Consumatori Utenti, the Consumer Protection Centre of Bolzano. Investigators then carried out a technical analysis of the Facebook app. The Garante said the size of the fine reflects the number of people affected, the fact that the violation is still in progress for people who have not updated the app or who already granted permission, a previous measure against the company in 2019, and what it called limited cooperation during the investigation.
What Italy fines Meta means for users and the appeal
Under the Italy fines Meta order, Meta must within 60 days keep the feature switched off by default, including for people who already granted permission, and ask for consent through a separate and specific request that explains what the feature does, that it needs gallery access, and how to turn it off. If a person gives no new consent, the feature stays off.
Meta rejected the regulator’s conclusions and said the 805 million euro penalty was disproportionate. “We strongly disagree with the assessment of the facts and the application of the law by the Garante and consider the amount of the fine disproportionate,” the company said in a statement reported by Italian broadcaster Sky TG24. Meta described the feature as a straightforward tool designed to help people publish photographs and videos on Facebook. It argued that users must grant permission through their device settings before the feature can operate and can change that permission whenever they choose. The company confirmed it will appeal the decision.
The decision did not rule on whether gallery content was used to train artificial intelligence models, a practice Meta denies. The Garante said it reserved the right to assess separately a new feature launched in 2026 that allows gallery content to be processed in the cloud. The Italy fines Meta penalty lands weeks after authorities in New Mexico ordered Meta to pay $25 billion in a separate data privacy case.