Facebook fined £500,000 for Cambridge Analytica scandal

Facebook fined £500,000 for Cambridge Analytica scandal

Cambridge:  UK’s data protection watchdog fined Facebook with £500,000 for its role in the Cambridge Analytica data scandal.

According to Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), Facebook had let a ‘serious breach’ of the law take place by giving app developers access to people’s data ‘without clear consent’ and notified the social network that it intended to issue the maximum fine, a report in BBC said.

Moreover, the ICO said in a statement,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.

However ‘Facebook also failed to keep the personal information secure because it failed to make suitable checks on apps and developers using its platform.’

Researcher Dr Aleksandr Kogan of Cambridge and his company GSR used a personality quiz to harvest the Facebook data of up to 87 million people.

Some of this data was shared with Cambridge Analytica, which used it to target political advertising in the US. “Even after the misuse of the data was discovered in December 2015, Facebook did not do enough to ensure those who continued to hold it had taken adequate and timely remedial action, including deletion,” the ICO said.

The ICO found that more than one million people in the UK had their data harvested by the personality quiz.

The ICO is still investigating how data analytics is used for political purposes.

Ms Denham is due to give evidence to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) Select Committee on 6 November.

 

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.