Nigeria fines Meta $220 mn over breach of data protection, consumer rights laws

Nigeria has issued a $220 million fine against Meta, the parent company of Facebook and WhatsApp, for “multiple and repeated” violations.

The country’s Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (FCCPC) on Friday accused Meta of violating the country’s data protection and consumer rights laws on Facebook and WhatsApp.

The FCCPC’s chief executive officer Adamu Abdullahi said the investigations the commission carried out in conjunction with the Nigeria Data Protection Commission between May 2021 and December 2023 showed that it engaged in “invasive practices against data subjects/consumers in Nigeria”.

Abdullahi accused Meta of discriminatory practices, abuse of market dominance, sharing Nigerians’ personal data without authorisation and denying Nigerians the right to determine how their data are used.

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Apart from the hefty fine, the FCCPC boss insisted that Meta must “comply with prevailing law and cease the exploitation of Nigerian consumers and their market abuse”.

It ordered the company to “desist from future similar or other conduct/practices that do not meet nationally applicable standards.”

Meta did not immediately respond to a request for a response to the fine. But the FCCPC said the company was aware of its 38-month investigation.

About three quarters of the 200 million people in Africa’s most populous country are younger than 24 – a generation that is also hyper-connected to social media.

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The country had some 164.3 million internet subscriptions as of March, according to the figures published by the National Communication Commission (NCC) on its website.

Meta’s platforms — WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram — are among the most popular social media in the country.

The minister for communication and the digital economy, Bosun Tijani, said in December that there were “over 51 million WhatsApp users in Nigeria”.

The European Union (EU) accused Meta at the beginning of July of breaching the bloc’s digital rules, paving the way for potential fines worth billions of euros.

The EU said Meta’s new ad-free subscription model for Facebook and Instagram “forced millions of users” in the bloc to pay to avoid data collection or agree to share their data with Facebook and Instagram to keep using the platforms for free.