The Federal Court of Australia has ordered Facebook owner Meta Platforms to pay $14 million in fines for unauthorised user data collection.

The company was found to be collecting user data through a now defunct smartphone app, Onavo, which had been advertised as a way to protect privacy. Onavo offered a virtual private network (VPN) service which claimed to keep personal information safe, but actually collected user data including location, time and frequency using other smartphone apps, and websites they visited for advertising purposes.

Meta has also been ordered to pay A$400,000 in legal costs to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) – which brought the civil lawsuit – through its Facebook Israel subsidiary and through Onavo.

In a written statement, judge Wendy Abraham said: "The failure to make sufficient disclosures ... may have deprived tens of thousands of Australian consumers of the opportunity to make an informed choice about the collection and use of their data before downloading and/or using Onavo Protect."

Abraham said that the court could have fined Meta hundreds of billions of dollars as the app was downloaded over 270,000 times by Australians with each breach of consumer law carrying a A$1.1 million fine. She however noted that "the contraventions can be characterised as a single course of conduct”.

The judge added that the fine "carries with it a sufficient sting to ensure that the penalty amount is not such as to be regarded ... as simply an acceptable cost of doing business."

In a statement to the ACCC, Meta said that it has never sought to mislead customers and that “over the last several years we have built tools to give people more transparency and control over how their data is used”.

While this fine concludes one area of controversy for Meta in Australia following the Cambridge Analytica scandal, the company still faces civil court action – and potential fines – from the country’s Office of the Information Commissioner over its dealings with Cambridge Analytica.

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