To a layman, his neighbor is someone who lives close to him, as simple as that. This coincidentally is not just a layman’s definition but also the dictionary definition of the word neighbor, but no, the word neighbor has a whole new meaning in law. 

This question, who is my neighbor was first raised by an English jurist; Lord Atkinson in the case Donoghue v. Stevenson UKHL 100, SC (HL) 31, AC 562, All ER Rep 1; in the year 1932, and the answer to this question propagated the as new principle of law known as “the neighborhood principle” and also expanded the principle of duty of care under the law of tort. 

A duty of care, therefore, is a legal obligation that is imposed on an individual, requiring adherence to a standard of reasonable care while performing any acts that could foreseeably harm others i.e. his neighbors. 

In effect, you owe a duty of care to your neighbors in law and you must apply every caution and exercise every reasonable care to ensure that your neighbor does not get injured from your actions or inactions. 

According to Lord Atkinson, our neighbors are persons who are so closely and directly affected by our acts or inactions that we ought reasonably ought to have them in contemplation as being so affected when we are directing our mind to the acts or omissions which are called in question.

By this legal principle of the law of tort, you are under strict liability and the requirement not to carry out any act which can cause harm to others. You are under strict liability to contemplate and avert your mind towards the harm you act or failure to act would reasonably cause another person and you are expected to do everything to avert that harm because you owe that next person a duty of care as your neighbor. 

In simpler terms, your neighbor-in-law can be anybody who could suffer an injury from your actions (things you do/ did) or your inactions (things you failed to do). 

For you to establish that a person is your neighbor you must first establish that his acts or omission could be reasonably foreseen to cause an injury to you. 

The key ingredient in establishing a neighbor in law is that it must be reasonably foreseen that the actions or inactions of that fellow will likely affect you by causing a direct injury to you.

According to this principle of law, manufacturers, producers, and makers of consumable items are your neighbors and they must exercise reasonable care in manufacturing any item that is to be released to the market for consumers to purchase and any injury suffered by any consumer they will be held liable to breach of duty of care. 

Meta has once again been caught in the web of a regulatory authority in Ireland. The social media behemoth, which has over the years been at the center of antitrust probes, was handed €405 million (about $402 million) fine by Ireland’s Data Protection Commission.

The huge fine follows an investigation into the company’s handling of teenagers’ data on Instagram.

The Verge reports that the decision and fine were finalized last Friday, according to its conversation by DPC spokesperson Caolmhe McGuire, and that “full details of the decision will publish next week.”

According to the report, the DPC’s deadline for making a final decision on this matter was the end of this week. The investigation started almost two years ago, and focused on two ways in which the company allegedly breached GDPR rules.

The first was Instagram allowing young users, ages 13-17, to set up business accounts on the platform, which made those users’ contact information publicly available. (Users sometimes switch to business accounts because doing so comes with access to more engagement analytics.) Instagram also allegedly made the accounts of some young users public by default.

This is the third and largest fine the DPC has imposed on Meta, easily eclipsing the 225 million euros (about $267 million at the time) the company faced after the DPC found that WhatsApp didn’t properly inform EU citizens about how it collected and used their data, particularly regarding how it shared that data back with Meta. WhatsApp was ordered to change its privacy policy, and said it planned to appeal.

There was also a much smaller fine of 17 million euros (about $18.6 million) for record-keeping issues around security breaches. The DPC also has dozens of other investigations underway against Big Tech companies, including several more involving Meta’s data practices.

Meta said in a statement to Politico that it updated the public-by-default setting more than a year ago, and that “anyone under 18 automatically has their account set to private when they join Instagram, so only people they know can see what they post, and adults can’t message teens who don’t follow them.” The company told the Associated Press that “we disagree with how this fine was calculated and intend to appeal it.”

The way Meta — and Instagram in particular — handle the online experience if its youngest users has been under a huge amount of scrutiny in the last couple of years, thanks in part to Frances Haugen’s testimony about Instagram’s effect on mental health. Instagram has also simultaneously tried to build more products for those young users, which has been met with huge backlash.

Instagram head Adam Mosseri has argued in favor of this work, though: “I have to believe parents would prefer the option for their children to use an age-appropriate version of Instagram — that gives them oversight — than the alternative,” he said last year. He promised to work with regulators to make that happen, and Meta said it also cooperated with the DPC’s recent investigation.