The State's data regulator has fined Twitter €450,000 for a bug that made some private tweets public, in the first sanction against a US firm under a new European Union data privacy system.
The EU's General Data Protection Regulation’s (GDPR) “One Stop Shop” regime makes the Data Protection Commission the lead regulator of Twitter, Facebook, Apple and Google in the bloc, due to the location of their EU headquarters.
GDPR has been in force since 2018, but the Twitter case is the first using a new dispute resolution system under which one lead national regulator makes a decision before consulting with the other EU national regulators.
Some EU regulators objected to Ireland's preliminary Twitter ruling when it was issued in May, triggering a referral to the dispute resolution body, the European Data Protection Board to secure a two-thirds majority among member states.
The Twitter fine relates to a 2019 probe into a bug in its Android app, where some users' protected tweets were made public.
In particular it was levied due to Twitter's “failure to notify the breach on time to the DPC and a failure to adequately document the breach," the Data Protection Commission said in a statement.
The Irish regulator, which has more than 20 major inquiries into US technology firms open, has the power to impose fines for violations of up to 4 per cent of a company's global revenue or €20 million, whichever is higher.
