Italy Fines Meta €805 Million and Orders Gallery Feature Off by Default

Italy's data protection authority fined Meta Platforms Ireland Limited €805 million on 14 November 2026 for reading Android users' photos, videos and associated metadata without specific consent. The Garante per la protezione dei dati personali said the Facebook app accessed the content without adequately informing users, tied to the "Get suggestions from gallery when browsing Facebook" feature introduced in 2023. About 20 million Android users in Italy were affected.

The regulator found the consent process too generic, relying on a broad permission that covered multiple Facebook functions rather than gallery access specifically. That violated Italian law implementing the EU's ePrivacy Directive. The €805 million penalty, roughly $887 million, is the largest ever levied by Italy's privacy watchdog.

The order goes beyond the fine. Meta must switch the feature off by default for users in Italy within 60 days, ask for separate consent, and report back to the regulator. Meta argued that Ireland's data regulator should have jurisdiction over the case. Italy rejected that argument because the ePrivacy Directive does not provide a one-stop-shop mechanism to assign such cases to a single EU regulator, which allowed Italy to proceed independently.

It shows a national regulator can act on ePrivacy matters without waiting for Ireland's lead authority, which may open the door to similar actions in other member states. And it puts Meta's broad-permission consent model for gallery access on notice: the Garante treated a single permission covering multiple functions as insufficient for reading photos and videos.

For security and privacy teams, the practical effect is a default change. Photo-suggestion features that rely on blanket gallery permissions now carry regulatory risk in Italy, and the 60-day clock is running.