Meta Hit With $15m Fine From South Korean Data Watchdog

South Korea’s data protection agency has ordered Meta Platforms – the owner of Facebook – to pay 21.62 billion won ($15.67 million) in fines for collecting and giving sensitive user data to advertisers without legal permission.

The US tech giant obtained information from about 980,000 South Korean Facebook users on issues such as their religion, political views, and sexuality but failing to get permission from users, the Personal Information Protection Commission said in a statement on Tuesday (November 5).

The information was then used by some 4,000 advertisers, the agency said.

ALSO SEE: China Researchers Made AI Tool For Military Use Via Meta’s Model

“Specifically, it has been found that (Meta) analyzed user behaviour data, such as pages they liked and advertisements they clicked on Facebook and created and managed advertising themes related to sensitive information,” the commission said.

This included users being categorized as being North Korean defectors, following a certain religion, or identifying as a transgender or gay person, the agency said.

Meta had also unfairly declined a request by users to access personal information and failed to prevent data on about 10 South Koreans from being leaked by hackers, the agency said.

A Meta Korea official declined to comment on the matter.

Rare bees sting Meta’s data centre plan

Meanwhile, in separate news, Meta’s plans to build an AI data centre near a nuclear power plant in the United States have been thwarted by multiple environmental and regulatory complications, according to a report by the Financial Times.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg told staff that one hurdle was the sighting of a rare bee species on the land where the tech giant had hoped to build the data centre, according to the FT report (after many years of exposure to pesticides, bee populations are fragile).

“Zuckerberg had planned to strike a deal with an existing nuclear power plant operator to provide emissions-free electricity for a new data centre supporting his artificial intelligence ambitions,” it said.

But Meta’s setback has come at a time when US tech giants are scrambling for greater power for AI data centres.

“The blow comes as rivals Amazon, Google and Microsoft have all struck deals recently with nuclear power plant operators to fulfil rising energy demands from data centres as they race to train and maintain power-hungry AI models. One AI query consumes up to 10 times the energy of a standard Google search,” it noted.

Microsoft announced in September that it would revive the old nuclear plant at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, while Amazon paid $650m in March to build a data centre next to the Susquehanna Steam Electric nuclear plant, also in Pennsylvania.

But Amazon’s plans also hit a snag, according to a report by Axios, which said the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), which oversees US power and natural gas grids, voted 2-1 on Friday to deny the expansion of an existing power agreement that would have allowed Amazon’s data centre to connect directly to the power plant.

FERC was concerned that other customers would potentially suffer lower reliability — brownouts or blackouts — and higher costs if the data centre could divert a significant portion of the power away from the rest of the region’s grid.