Facebook Inc was slapped with a symbolic ￡500,000 (US$645,250) fine by the UK’s privacy regulator for “serious” breaches of data protection rules that paved the way for the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
The fine is the highest possible for the UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) under old rules that predated this year’s EU revamp of privacy penalties.
The office said that between 2007 and 2014, “Facebook processed the personal information of users unfairly by allowing application developers access to their information without sufficiently clear and informed consent.”
The revelations that data belonging to millions of Facebook users and their friends might have been misused triggered a global backlash from investors and regulators.
The ICO has led the European investigations into how such an amount of data — most belonging to US and UK residents — could have ended up in the hands of Cambridge Analytica, a consulting firm that worked on US President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign.
“Facebook also failed to keep the personal information secure because it failed to make suitable checks on apps and developers using its platform,” the ICO said yesterday. “These failings meant one developer, Dr Aleksandr Kogan and his company GSR, harvested the Facebook data of up to 87 million people worldwide, without their knowledge.”
Kogan is the researcher who collected users’ information and subsequently sold it to Cambridge Analytica.
UK Information Commissioner Elizabeth Denham, who was attending a privacy conference in Brussels, said in the statement that “a company of its size and expertise should have known better and it should have done better.”
“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,” Facebook said in an e-mailed response to the decision.
“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,” the company said.
The fine comes on the same day that the company drew praise from some of Europe’s top privacy officials, including European Commissioner for Justice, Consumers and Gender Equality Vera Jourova, for its pledge of support for greater protection of personal data.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Apple Inc CEO Tim Cook both on Wednesday told a Brussels event that the US should follow the EU’s lead on privacy.
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