Five years after the incident was uncovered and fixed, a European regulator is penalizing Facebook parent company Meta for violating the European Union's GDPR laws on data privacy.

Meta had failed in several areas – including not notifying the authorities promptly about the breach and failing to use adequate security measures to protect users’ sensitive information. Storing pass

Meta received a fine of over $100 million in a five-year EU investigation of about 600 million Facebook passwords stored in plaintext.

Meta has been hit with yet another privacy penalty in Europe. The DPC opened a statutory inquiry into the incident in question in April 2019 under the bloc's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) after Meta,

"It is widely accepted that user passwords should not be stored in plaintext, considering the risks of abuse that arise from persons accessing such data," said Deputy Commissioner