WhatsApp Slammed With €225 Million Fine By Data Protection Commission

The popular messaging app, WhatsApp has been hit with a whopping €225 million fine, by the Data Protection Commission. This was made known in a statement made available on its official website. The fine is the largest ever from the Irish Data Protection Commission, and second largest under EU GDPR rules. The fine is coming after the commission began looking to determine if WhatsApp has discharged its GDPR transparency obligations with regard to the provision of information and the transparency of that information to both users and non-users of WhatsApp’s service.

The investigation began far back in December 2018 according to the statement made by the commission. Alongside the administrative fine, the commission also imposed a reprimand along with an order for WhatsApp to bring its processing into compliance by taking a range of specified remedial actions.

In response to the fine, a WhatsApp spokesperson reviewed that the company has done enough to ensure the information they provide is transparent and comprehensive. According to him, WhatsApp disagrees with the decision and plans to appeal the decision.

Both WhatsApp and its parent company Facebook has been under fire in recent times due to privacy issues. Facebook has its EU headquarters is in Ireland. The company has been under the radar of many governments after about 530 million people had their personal information leaked online.

Source: Data Protection Commission