South Korea's data protection agency said it had ordered Meta(META.US) to pay a 2.162 billion won (US$1.567 million) fine after discovering that the social media giant collected sensitive user data and provided it to advertisers without legal grounds.The Korea Information Protection Commission said on Tuesday that the US tech giant had obtained information such as religious beliefs, political views and sexual orientation of about 980,000 South Korean Facebook users without their consent. The commission added that the information was then used by about 4,000 advertisers."The commission found that Meta analysed user behaviour data such as pages they liked and ads they clicked on Facebook and created and managed ad topics related to sensitive information," the commission said, adding that Meta also unfairly denied users' requests for access to their personal information and failed to prevent the leak of personal information of more than 10 South Koreans.