Facebook, Netflix fined over privacy violations in S. Korea

Seoul, Aug 25 : A South Korean watchdog on personal information protection on Wednesday fined major foreign platform service providers nearly 6.7 billion won (US$ 5.7 million) over privacy violations.

The Personal Information Protection Commission imposed the penalty on Facebook, Netflix and Google and ordered them to fix the problems following its probe.

Facebook was slapped with the heaviest penalty of 6.46 billion won. The Commission said the US-based social network service provider created and stored facial recognition templates of 2,00,000 local users without consent in between April 2018 and September 2019, reports Yonhap news agency.

The latest fine on Facebook is the second largest from the committee.

In November 2020, the committee ordered Facebook to pay 6.7 billion won and sought a criminal investigation for providing personal information to other operators without users' consent.

Facebook was accused of collecting people's residential registration number in an unlawful way and not notifying changes regarding its personal information management.

Netflix was ordered to pay more than 220 million won in penalties for collecting the personal information of five million people without their consent even before their service registration process was completed. The content streaming giant was also held responsible for not unveiling information on personal data transfer outside the country.

Google was not fined but was recommended to improve its personal information handling measures by the Commission. It pointed out that Google's legal notice on collecting personal information is vague.