The Data Protection Commission has fined Instagram €405 million for breaking the privacy rights of children.
The full details of this fine will be published next week says the Data Protection Commission.
There were two key issues at the heart of this inquiry.
One of them was allowing those aged between 13 and 17 have business accounts on the platform and facilitated their phone numbers being published on the website.
While another one a system operated which allowed child profiles be set to public by default - and then could only be changed by going into the privacy settings.
This inquiry started nearly two years ago on September 21st 2020.
This €405 million fine though is the largest handed out by the Data Protection Commission so far.
Instagram is owned by Meta, which also operates Facebook and Whatsapp which in the past year have had €17 million and more than €200 million fines respectively from the Commission.
Instagram says it disagrees with how the fine was calculated and intends to appeal it.
It also says the inquiry was focused on old settings that were updated over a year ago.
