Did Facebook Peek Into Your Phone Gallery Without Telling You? Italy Says Yes, Fines Meta $887 Million

Rome: Italy’s privacy watchdog has imposed a penalty of almost USD 887 million, equivalent to around Rs 8300 crore, on Meta for quietly dipping into the photo and video libraries of Android users through Facebook. The order, issued on Saturday, centres on around 20 million people in Italy whose galleries were accessed without being given a clear explanation or asked for distinct permission. 

The regulator concluded that Meta had failed to inform users properly about what the firm was doing and had not secured the specific consent the law demands.

Meta now faces a 60-day deadline to switch the feature off as a default setting and to approach users afresh to keep the service available. Anyone who chooses to turn the feature on must first be told in plain terms that Facebook will look inside their phone gallery, and must be shown exactly how to disable the function. As of Saturday afternoon, the company had not replied to a request for comment.

Permission Led To Record Penalty

The tool at the heart of the dispute has been available since 2023. It scans images stored on a device and puts forward suggestions for pictures and clips a person might wish to share on Facebook. According to the watchdog, Facebook relied upon a single, catch-all request for access to the gallery across the whole application. The privacy watchdog in Italy stated that the notice was so wide-ranging that ordinary users could not reasonably grasp that agreeing to it would also switch on the suggestions feature.

The Italian authority weighed the scale of population affected when deciding the size of the penalty, also the length of time the practice had continued, and Meta’s failure to cooperate fully. It added that the problem had not disappeared on its own, because it continued to affect people who had not updated the application or who had already granted access under the earlier arrangement.

As per reports, the inquiry was opened in 2025, with one question that whether the photographs and videos had been used to train artificial intelligence systems deliberately left outside the scope. Meta denied that the material had been used for that purpose, the regulator added. 

Separately, the authority indicated that it may examine another function introduced in 2026, which enables photographs and videos from users’ galleries to be processed on remote servers. Further details regarding the action taken are awaited.