Global social media giant Facebook has agreed to pay a £500,000 fine to the UK ICO for the Cambridge Analytica data misuse scandal.
Back in 2017, Facebook became the target of an investigation into misuse of data it had collected on users. Data supplied to the firm Cambridge Analytica was reportedly used to target political advertising and sponsored content on Facebook to niche demographics in order to influence people's political beliefs.
Cambridge Analytica was found to have acquired data on millions of Facebook users that was scraped from the site via a personality quiz app, and was reported to have used social media micro-targeting to influence the 2016 Brexit referrentum in the UK and presidential elections in the US. Facebook's mishandling of user data and privacy controls has been a hot topic ever since.
The Information Commissioner's Office in the UK issued a £500,000 fine for breach of data protection, and Facebook has now finally agreed to pay this fine. Though Facebook has not admitted responsibility or liability in this case, it agreed to pay the fine and co-operate with the ICO investigations.
The £500,000 fine was the largest allowable fine under the UK's old data protection laws, and is a fraction of the $5bn fine recently levied against the tech giant by the US Federal Trade Commission. The UK's data protetion laws were beefed up last year by the EU General Data Protection Regulation, so future data breaches of UK or EU residents could lead to significantly higher fines.
Source: BBC News
