Italy Hits Meta With Record €805 Million Fine Over Facebook Photo Gallery Access

Italy's data protection authority has fined Meta €805 million, about $887 million, after finding that the Facebook app on Android phones reached into users' photo galleries without their specific consent. Announced in Rome on Saturday, 14 November 2026, the penalty is by far the largest the Italian regulator has ever imposed.

The case turns on a feature that suggests photos and videos from a phone's gallery as ideas for a Facebook post while the user is browsing the app. According to the Garante, the Italian data protection authority, the feature has been running since 2023 and was switched on by default, affecting an estimated 20 million Android users in Italy.

What the regulator found

The Garante said the Facebook app for Android "accessed photos, videos and associated metadata stored on Italian users' smartphones without specific consent and without informing them". The problem, in the regulator's view, was not the idea of suggesting photos, but the way permission for it was obtained.

Consent was collected through a single, generic permission covering the whole app, rather than a separate request for the gallery feature itself. The prompt users saw did not make clear that agreeing also authorised Facebook to read their photo gallery and use its contents for suggestions. Because the feature was also enabled by default, millions of people were included without ever making an active choice about it.

The decision is based on Article 122 of Italy's Privacy Code, the provision that brings the European Union's ePrivacy Directive into Italian law. The Garante also rejected Meta's argument that the case should have been handled by Ireland's regulator, where Meta's European operations are based, because the ePrivacy rules at issue do not come with the GDPR's one-stop-shop mechanism.

A 60-day order to fix the feature

Alongside the fine, the Garante ordered Meta to fix the way the feature asks for permission. Within 60 days, the company must switch the gallery suggestions feature off by default for users in Italy and ask for separate, specific consent before it can run again. Anyone who has not given that consent must not have the feature active.

The investigation began in July 2025, after a report from the Centro Tutela Consumatori Utenti di Bolzano, a consumer protection centre in the South Tyrol capital. The authority then carried out its own technical analysis of how the app handled gallery access.

Why the fine is so large

The Garante put the penalty at about 0.47 percent of Meta's worldwide turnover. It said two factors pushed the figure up: what it described as Meta's lack of cooperation during the proceedings, and an earlier violation that resulted in a fine in 2019.

The scale of the case also mattered. With roughly 20 million Italian Android users affected, the authority treated the breach as widespread rather than a narrow technical fault, and the violation was still ongoing for people who had not updated the app or had already granted the authorisation.

Meta's response

Meta has said it will appeal the decision, calling the penalty "disproportionate", according to the BBC. The company has the right to challenge the Garante's ruling, and an appeal would put the fine and the accompanying order before the courts.

It is worth noting what this case did not cover. The proceedings did not address whether photos or other content were used to train artificial intelligence models, something Meta denies. The Garante did, however, reserve the right to look separately at a newer feature, introduced in 2026, that allows content from users' galleries to be processed in the cloud.

Why it matters

The ruling is a reminder that the consent behind a feature matters as much as the feature itself. A suggestion tool that most users would probably find harmless became a record-breaking fine because the permission was bundled, vague and switched on by default.

For Meta, the decision adds to a growing list of privacy disputes in Europe, and the company is already testing new products while these cases pile up — Meta employees are currently testing a prediction-market app called Takes. For regulators, the Garante's move shows a willingness to use the ePrivacy rules directly, even when a company argues the case belongs in another country. And for the roughly 20 million Italians affected, the practical change is simple: Facebook will have to ask, clearly and separately, before it looks at their photos again.

Sources

• Al Jazeera — Italy fines Meta $880m over photo privacy
• Garante per la protezione dei dati personali — Facebook: il Garante Privacy sanziona Meta per 805 milioni di euro (Doc-Web 10321080)
• BBC — reporting on Meta's appeal and the size of the fine