Meta has been fined €805 million in Italy after Facebook accessed users’ photos on Android devices without obtaining specific consent, the country’s data protection authority said on Saturday.
The Italian watchdog said Meta had accessed photographs, videos and related metadata belonging to Italian users through the Facebook app without properly informing them or securing clear, specific permission.
The case centres on the “Get suggestions from gallery” feature, available since 2023, which suggests photos and videos from a user’s phone gallery as potential Facebook posts while they browse the app.
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According to the authority, Facebook sought access to the gallery through a single permission covering the whole app, accompanied by a vague notice referring to “activating other features.”
It said this did not allow users to understand that they were also authorising Facebook to use content from their gallery for posting suggestions.
Meta has now been ordered to request consent through a separate and specific prompt for this feature, and to clearly explain what it does, that it involves access to the gallery, and how users can disable it.
The regulator said the size of the fine reflected the large number of people affected, estimated at about 20 million Android users in Italy, as well as the length of the breach.
It added that the violation was still ongoing for users who had not updated the app and for those who had already granted permission, and cited what it described as Meta’s limited co-operation during the investigation.
The penalty is among the largest ever imposed by an Italian authority on a technology company.
In 2021, Amazon was fined more than €1.1 billion in Italy for breaching competition law, although that penalty was later reduced on appeal to €752 million.
Meta can also appeal against the ruling. The company did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Saturday afternoon.
The Italian decision follows another major penalty for Meta announced in late October, when the company was ordered in New Mexico to pay $25 billion (€22.68 billion) over claims that it had misled residents of the US state for more than a decade about how their data was used.
Meta criticised that ruling as a “tax” on free speech.
The Italian authority said the latest fine amounts to about 0.4% of Meta’s annual revenue, which reached $201 billion (€182.34 billion) in 2025, with net profit of $60.5 billion (€54.88 billion).
