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Meta Platforms Ireland was fined €91 million by Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC) after Facebook Lite passwords were inadvertently logged in plaintext on internal systems. The DPC’s official penalty was €91 million; the Associated Press reported it as about $101.6 million, commonly rounded to $102 million.
What happened to the Facebook Lite passwords?
Code changes made in November and December 2018 caused passwords to be logged in plaintext. The DPC’s decision describes two incidents, discovered on 7 January and 31 January 2019. Meta notified the DPC in March 2019, prompting an inquiry.
The DPC adopted its final decision on 26 September 2024 and announced it the next day. The enforcement action was against Meta Platforms Ireland Limited; it was not a finding that every Meta service stored passwords this way.
How many users were affected, and were passwords misused?
The DPC said the incidents involved tens of millions of EU Facebook Lite users. That is the regulator’s stated scale; it does not support claims that all 600 million Facebook passwords were affected.
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The passwords were on Meta’s internal systems and available to staff in a way that could have enabled accounts to be linked with unencrypted passwords. The DPC said they were not made available to external parties. Meta said it had no evidence the passwords were abused or accessed improperly. That means the cited statements establish no evidence of misuse—not proof that no person ever viewed a password internally.
Why did internal password logging count as a GDPR breach?
The DPC treated each plaintext-logging incident as a personal-data breach under GDPR Article 4(12). The fact that the data was on internal systems did not remove the security risk: plaintext passwords could expose accounts if accessed by staff or otherwise mishandled.
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- Article 33(1): Meta failed to notify the DPC without undue delay and within 72 hours of discovering the 31 January incident.
- Article 33(5): Meta failed to document both breaches.
- Articles 5(1)(f) and 32(1): Meta failed to implement appropriate technical and organisational measures to protect the personal data.
The DPC highlighted possible fraud, impersonation and spamming, as well as financial or reputational loss. Deputy Commissioner Graham Doyle said: “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.”
How was the €91 million fine divided?
| GDPR provision | DPC penalty | Finding |
|---|---|---|
| Article 33(1) | €8 million | Failure to notify the regulator as required |
| Article 33(5) | €8 million | Failure to document the breaches |
| Articles 5(1)(f) and 32(1) | €75 million | Failure to implement appropriate security measures |
| Total | €91 million | The DPC also issued a reprimand |
The $102 million figure is a rounded dollar conversion of the official euro penalty, not the amount imposed by the DPC.
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What does the case mean for password security?
It illustrates that password security includes more than the database where a password is normally stored. Logs can become another place where credentials are exposed. Secure handling calls for cryptographic protection rather than readable passwords, sanitising logs so secrets are not recorded, limiting access to sensitive systems, and documenting and reporting incidents on time.
For users, the DPC’s published summary gives a group-level estimate, not a list of affected accounts. The cited statements do not establish whether Meta sent individual notices or required password resets. If you reuse a password across services, changing it to a unique one and enabling multifactor authentication are sensible general protections, independent of whether your account was involved.
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