UK watchdog fines Facebook £500,000 for data breach
London: The UK's Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) on Thursday fined Facebook 500,000 pounds for serious breaches of data protection law, the maximum amount it is authorised to issue.
The fine by the country's independent data watchdog related to the American social media giant's role in the Cambridge Analytica data scandal, which hit the headlines earlier this year.
The ICO said its investigation found 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, and allowing access even if users had not downloaded the app, but were simply "friends" with people who had.
"Facebook failed to sufficiently protect the privacy of its users before, during and after the unlawful processing of this data. A company of its size and expertise should have known better and it should have done better," said Information Commissioner Elizabeth Denham.
The fine has been served under the UK's Data Protection Act 1998, which has since been replaced by the new Data Protection Act 2018 in May, alongside the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The new rules provide a range of new enforcement tools for the ICO, including maximum fines of 17 million pounds or 4 per cent of global turnover.
Denham said, "We considered these contraventions to be so serious we imposed the maximum penalty under the previous legislation. The fine would inevitably have been significantly higher under the GDPR. One of our main motivations for taking enforcement action is to drive meaningful change in how organisations handle people's personal
data".
"Our work is continuing. There are still bigger questions to be asked and broader conversations to be had about how technology and democracy interact and whether the legal, ethical and regulatory frameworks we have in place are adequate to protect the principles on which our society is based," she said.
