A former Meta employee has been investigated for downloading around 30,000 private Facebook photos. The engineer is suspected of designing a program to access personal pictures on the site while bypassing security checks. A Met Police spokesperson told the BBC that an arrest was made in November 2025, and the suspect remains on bail pending further investigation.

The breach was discovered over a year ago by Meta, which swiftly fired the employee and referred the matter to law enforcement. Meanwhile, Meta has had a string of recent security issues. In November 2022, it was fined €265m (£228m) for a data leak that exposed personal details of hundreds of millions of users. A further fine of €91m (£75m) in September 2024 followed after the DPC found Meta had stored passwords on its internal systems without encryption.

The company, which owns Instagram and WhatsApp, has also faced legal battles over the addictive design of its apps. In March, a jury in California found both Meta and YouTube owner Google to have intentionally built addictive social media platforms that harmed mental health, awarding a young woman $6m (£4.5m) in damages.

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