Nigeria is fining Facebook and WhatsApp parent company Meta $220 million for “multiple and repeated” data 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 investigations carried out in conjunction with the Nigeria Data Protection Commission between May 2021 and December 2023 revealed “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.
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”.
A WhatsApp spokesperson said in an email statement that “We disagree with this decision as well as the fine and we are appealing the decision.”
About three quarters of the 200 million people in Africa’s most populous country are younger than 24 — a generation that is hyper-connected on social media.
The country had some 164.3 million internet subscriptions as of March, according to figures published on the National Communication Commission’s (NCC) website.
Meta’s social media platforms — WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram — are amongst the most popular in the country.
The minister for communication and the digital economy, Bosun Tijani, said in December that there were more than 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.
