Meta fine: Italy orders Meta to pay €805 million for accessing Android users' photo galleries without consent

A Meta fine announced in Rome on Saturday, 14 November, has put the Facebook owner's handling of private photos back in the spotlight. Italy's data protection authority, known as the Garante, ordered Meta to pay €805 million after concluding that a Facebook feature on Android phones read users' photos and videos without asking for separate consent.

What the regulator found

According to the decision, the Facebook app for Android included a feature that suggested photos and videos from a user's phone to share on the platform. To make those suggestions, the app looked into the person's personal media gallery.

The problem, the authority said, is that Meta never asked for a separate, specific consent for this access and did not explain it properly to users. Under European rules, reading information stored on someone's device requires clear permission, and the regulator found that this condition was not met.

How large is the penalty

€805 million is close to 890 million US dollars. The authority put it at about 0.47% of Meta's worldwide revenue. For comparison, Ireland's Data Protection Commission fined Meta €1.2 billion in 2023 over transfers of European users' data to the United States.

What Meta must do now

Under the ruling, Meta has 60 days to:

• switch the feature off by default;
• obtain a separate consent from users before the app accesses their gallery content.

Meta's formal response, and whether it will appeal, was not known at the time of writing.

The AI question

The investigation did not examine whether the photos or videos were used to train artificial intelligence models, and Meta denies doing so. The regulator did, however, keep the right to investigate separately a feature introduced in 2026 that processes gallery content through cloud systems.

Background

The investigation began in 2025, so the decision arrives after roughly a year and a half of review. European regulators have stepped up action against large technology companies over personal data in recent years. In this case, the central question was whether users had clearly agreed before an app read private files kept on their own phones.

How to check your own phone

The decision covers users in Italy, but millions of people in Bangladesh use Facebook on Android. To protect your privacy:

1. Open Settings → Apps → Facebook → Permissions on your phone.
2. Check Photos and videos and choose "Don't allow" or "Allow limited access" if the app does not need full access.
3. Inside the Facebook app, turn off any camera roll or gallery suggestion option you do not use.
4. Keep the app updated, because new versions often add privacy controls.

What happens next

European regulators will watch what changes Meta makes within the 60-day window. A separate probe into the cloud-processing feature, if it opens, could add further pressure on the company.

Sources

The facts in this report were cross-checked with reports from Yahoo Finance (Investing.com), PPC Land, Bloomberg and Anadolu Agency.