LONDON — Meta was fined roughly $400 million for breaking European Union data privacy laws for its treatment of children’s data on Instagram, the latest in a series of steps by authorities in Europe and the United States to crack down on what information is collected and shared by companies about young people online.
Ireland’s Data Protection Commission said it decided on Sept. 2 to impose what would be one of the largest fines to date under the General Data Protection Regulation, or G.D.P.R., the four-year-old European data privacy law that has been criticized for being weakly enforced.
Policymakers are attempting to better safeguard children’s data generated on social media, online video games and other internet services. California lawmakers last week passed a law that would require many online services to increase protections for children. Britain passed a similar law last year.
