On Friday, the South Korean state watchdog on personal information protection recommended that Facebook’s operator pay each of the 181 users seeking damages for the improper disclosure of their personal information to third parties pay 300,000 won ($256.70) in compensation.
The Personal Information Protection Commission’s (PIPC) dispute mediation panel made the recommendation to Meta Platforms in order to resolve a disagreement between the operator and Korean Facebook users over the platform’s breach of users’ personal data.
Between May 2012 and June 2018, the state watchdog decided that Facebook passed personal data of at least 3.3 million of its total 18 million Korean users to third parties without their consent.
The lists of the users’ Facebook friends were among the data that was leaked.
According to the Yonhap news agency, Facebook was fined 6.7 billion won for violating privacy laws at the time.
In response, a group of local Facebook users filed a damage relief process with the PIPC in April, seeking financial compensation and information from Facebook’s operator on which personal data was leaked and to whom.
PIPC proposed an arbitration agreement in which Meta would pay each of the 181 users who joined the collection action $300,000 in financial compensation and give them access to the information they requested.
According to the dispute mediation panel, over 10,000 third-party app developers gained access to personal information of local Facebook users without the their knowledge or consent.