UK Fines Facebook £500,000 For Failing To Protect User Data

Facebook has been fined £500,000 by the Information Commissioner’s Office in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, after allowing third party developers to access user information without sufficient consent.





The ICO announcement on Thursday upholds its initial decision in July. The fine, which represents a drop in the ocean for a company that brought in $40.7bn (£31.5bn) in global revenue in 2017, was the maximum available to the regulator under old data protection legislation.


The ICO found that the personal information of at least 1 million UK users was among harvested data and was consequently put at risk of further misuse. It also insisted that the company could have faced a substantially higher fine of up to £1.2bn under the new regulatory system.


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The investigation found that Facebook failed to keep the personal information of its users secure by failing to make suitable checks on developers using its platform.


These failings meant one developer, Aleksandr Kogan, was able to convince 300,000 people to install a personality testing application that fed back the Facebook data of both users and their friends, enabling him to harvest the profiles of up to 87 million people worldwide without their knowledge.


A subset of the data was later shared with other organisations, including SCL Group, the parent company of Cambridge Analytica, which was involved in running targeted Facebook adverts in US political contests, only to collapse earlier this year following a series of reports by the Observer.


Facebook, which has the right to appeal the verdict, said: “We are currently reviewing the ICO’s decision. While we respectfully disagree with some of their findings, we have said before that we should have done more to investigate claims about Cambridge Analytica and taken action in 2015. We are grateful that the ICO has acknowledged our full cooperation throughout their investigation, and have also confirmed they have found no evidence to suggest UK Facebook users’ data was in fact shared with Cambridge Analytica.”
From the guardian UK