Twitter, the world’s second social media networking giant, has been slapped with a £410,000 penalty from the Ireland Data Regulator for making private tweets public because of a technical bug.
The penalty pronounced by the Irish data watchdog is in line with the latest GDPR rules that kicked in May 2018.
Twitter that is said to earn around £2.5 billion in revenue every year from Europe is yet to react to the penalty. However, the company said that it will look into the matter on a serious note and will see that such kind of regulatory breaches never occur in the future.
Note 1- In the year 2019, almost all Twitter users using the company’s app on Android phones experienced a technical bug issue where all their private messages were being displayed to the public. As the social media giant failed to notify the Data Protection Commission on Ireland on what exactly happened, it has been slapped with the above stated retribution amount.
Note 2- The latest penalty announcement made by Ireland seems like a warning sign to all US companies that have made Ireland as their headquarters for the tax benefits.
Note 3– The General Data Protection Regulatory rules of Europe that kicked in May 2018 gave the power to the data watchdog to penalize companies that cannot protect their user data or mishandle it for monetary benefits. The law also offers the permission to online service users to seek for details on how their data is being used by the companies for transparency. The data regulators have been allowed to impose a penalty on the companies that breach the GDPR rules and the penalty amount will be equal to 4% of the annual turnover of the company.
