Asian Tech Press (Aug 27) -- South Korea's Personal Information Protection Commission decided on Wednesday to levy fines totaling about 6.7 billion won ($5.73 million) against Facebook Inc. and Netflix Inc. for privacy violations, KBS World reported on Thursday.

The personal information protection watchdog slapped about 6.7 billion won in fines on three overseas platform operators, including Facebook, Netflix and Google, and asked the three companies to take necessary improvements.

Facebook had the most items of violations, totaling six, and was fined 6.44 billion won ($5.51 million) for creating and storing facial recognition templates of 200,000 Korean users without their consent from April 2018 to September 2019.

In addition, the watchdog also imposed a fine of 26 million won ($22,254) for Facebook's illegal collection of resident registration numbers and consigning personal information to another entity.

Netflix was fined about 220 million won ($188,301) for collecting personal information of 5 million users without their consent before their registration was completed.

Although Google was not fined because it did not violate laws, it was advised to improve its legal notification on personal information collection.