Social media giant Meta and subsidiaries have received $20 million in fines after an app that claimed to protect personal information was found to have collected user data for commercial benefit.

Onavo Protect was a free mobile app made available by Meta that provided a virtual private network service which claimed to “keep you and your data safe online” and promised users peace of mind, according to its App Store listing.

The app also told users their data would not be used for any purpose other than providing Onavo Protect’s products.

The Australian Consumer and Competition Commission took Facebook Israel Ltd and its subsidiaries to court in 2020 after it found Meta had collected significant amounts of user information for commercial purposes between February 2016 and October 2017.

In a judgement handed down on Wednesday, Federal Court Justice Wendy Abraham found the company’s conduct was likely to mislead or deceive Australian consumers and fined the social media conglomerate $20 million, with $10 million coming from Facebook and $10 million from Onavo.

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Meta will also pay $400,000 for the ACCC’s legal costs.

The consumer watchdog found Onavo Protect tracked users’ online activity, taking records of every app they accessed and the exact number of seconds spent on each app, alongside information about their device and location data based on IP addresses.

If Onavo Protect users had a Facebook account, Meta could combine the data from both sources and learn “nearly everything they are doing on their mobile device”.

Meta used this information for advertising and marketing activities like identifying future acquisition targets, and developing business strategies.

The Federal Court’s decision comes almost a year after Meta agreed to pay $1.1 billion for providing political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica access to data from as many as 87 million Facebook users, on top of previous billion-dollar penalties for that data breach.

AAP