Meta will be fined 98,500 a day over privacy breaches starting from 14 August, Norway’s data protection authority announced on Monday.
The regulator, Datatilsynet, previously stated that the tech giant would be fined if it did not address privacy breaches the regulator had identified.
Datatilsynet said Meta cannot harvest user data in Norway, such as users’ physical locations, and use it to target advertising at them, called behavioral advertising, a business model common to big tech.
It had until 4 August to prove to the regulator that it had addressed the issue.
“As of next Monday, a daily fine of 1 million crowns will start to apply,” Tobias Judin, head of Datatilsynet’s international section told Reuters.
“According to Meta, this will take several months, at the very earliest, for them to implement … And we don’t know what the consent mechanism will look like,” Judin said. “And in the (meantime), peoples’ rights are being violated, every single day.”
Last week, Meta announced that it intends to ask users in the European Union (EU) for their consent before allowing businesses to target advertising based on what they view on its services such as Facebook and Instagram.
Although Norway is not a member of the EU, it is part of the European single market.
