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Twitter International Company was fined €450,000 by Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC) after it notified the regulator late about a personal data breach and failed to keep adequate records of it. The breach involved an Android bug that could make protected tweets public when a user changed the email address associated with the account.
Some coverage described the penalty as nearly $550,000, an approximate conversion. The DPC’s final decision states a $500,000 fine and estimates that amount at €450,000; the regulator’s announcements identify the administrative fine as €450,000.
What the Twitter Android bug did
The bug affected Twitter for Android. If a user with a protected account changed the account’s associated email address, the account could become unprotected, making tweets that should have been limited to followers publicly accessible. The DPC’s decision quotes TIC’s breach notification form describing that behavior.
Twitter confirmed to the DPC that the bug was introduced on 4 November 2014 and fully remediated on 14 January 2019. TIC reported that 88,726 users in the EU and European Economic Area (EEA) were affected. That is the reported count, not a confirmed total: the DPC says Twitter could not identify everyone who may have been affected because its available logs had retention limits, and that additional people may have been impacted.
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Why the DPC said Twitter reported the breach late
The case concerned Twitter International Company (TIC), Twitter’s Irish entity, and a breach at its processor, Twitter Inc. The DPC assessed when TIC should have notified the regulator, not the underlying software bug as a standalone security case.
| Date | What happened |
|---|---|
| 26 December 2018 | An external contractor in Twitter’s Bug Bounty Program first reported the bug. |
| 29 December 2018 | The contractor communicated its assessment to Twitter Inc. |
| 2 January 2019 | Twitter Inc. began an internal Information Security review. |
| 3 January 2019 | Twitter Inc. assessed the incident as a potential personal data breach and decided to start its incident response plan. |
| 4 January 2019 | An incident-management ticket was opened, but a process failure meant TIC’s Data Protection Officer was not added, delaying notification to TIC. |
| 7 January 2019 | TIC said it first became aware of the breach through its processor. |
| 8 January 2019 | TIC notified the DPC. |
The DPC concluded that TIC ought to have been aware of the breach by 3 January at the latest, rather than the 7 January date TIC gave for its awareness. It considered both the delay before Twitter’s security review and the later failure to notify TIC’s Data Protection Officer. Twitter attributed the earlier delay to the winter holiday schedule; the DPC did not consider holidays a reasonable basis for neglecting data-protection risks.
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Which GDPR requirements were breached
The DPC found that TIC infringed two provisions:
- GDPR Article 33(1): TIC did not notify the DPC within the required time once it ought to have been aware of the breach.
- GDPR Article 33(5): TIC did not keep an adequate record of the breach, including its facts and effects, the reasons for the delay, and how it assessed risk to affected users. The DPC had to make multiple inquiries to clarify the notification facts.
The fine was for the notification and recordkeeping infringements, not simply for the existence of the bug. The inquiry did not establish additional or alternative infringements under GDPR Articles 5(1)(f), 5(2), 24, or 32: the European Data Protection Board (EDPB) could not establish those on the factual record before it.
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The DPC adopted its final decision on 9 December 2020. Other supervisory authorities objected to parts of its draft decision, including the proposed fine. When the authorities could not reach consensus, the matter went to the EDPB under Article 65 of the GDPR. The EDPB issued a binding decision directing the DPC to reassess and increase the fine. The DPC’s final decision states the fine as $500,000, estimated there at €450,000; its public announcements identify the administrative fine as €450,000.
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- NEED MORE STORAGE? WE HAVE YOU COVERED: With an improved 2TB of expandable storage, Galaxy A17 5G makes it easy to keep cherished photos, videos and important files readily accessible whenever you need them.³
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In its announcement on 15 December 2020, the DPC described the fine as “an effective, proportionate and dissuasive measure.” In October 2021, the Dublin Circuit Court confirmed the €450,000 fine.
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