Facebook Pays $644,000 UK Fine Over Cambridge Analytica Case, Doesn’t Admit Fault
Facebook Pays $644,000 UK Fine
Over Cambridge Analytica Case, Doesn’t Admit Fault
Social network to pay
£500,000 after 87 million users had their information unwittingly accessed by
Cambridge Analytica
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7:59 AM
Facebook has agreed to pay the Information Commissioner’s
Office, the United Kingdom’s privacy regulator, a £500,000 fine on Wednesday
over its Cambridge Analytica data leak, but did not admit any wrongdoing in the
matter.
The fine, equal to about $644,000 at current exchange rates,
comes after more than a year of legal back-and-forth between the social network
and U.K. regulators. It’s also the maximum amount the ICO could levy against
Facebook; if the company’s infractions had come after Europe’s GDPR data
privacy laws were implemented in 2018, Facebook could’ve been fined up to 4% of
its annual global revenue.
The
Cambridge Analytica scandal rocked Facebook for much of 2018, after the company
admitted that up to 87 million users had
their profiles unwittingly accessed by the political consulting firm. Cambridge
Analytica paid University of Cambridge professor Aleksandr Kogan for data on
the personality makeup of millions of Facebook users leading up to the 2014
midterm elections; Cambridge Analytica was later contracted by the Trump
campaign in 2016 to help target potential voters — pulling in $15 million
in the process.
The ICO,
in its statement on the settlement, said Facebook “made no admission of
liability.”
The settlement comes a few months after Facebook agreed to pay a
record $5 billion fine to the Federal Trade Commission in the U.S. over the
company’s mishandling of user data.
As part of its FTC settlement, Facebook will create a privacy
oversight committee with independent members. The members can only be fired by
a supermajority of Facebook’s board, not by CEO Mark Zuckerberg alone.
Zuckerberg and other newly appointed compliance officers must also submit to
quarterly FTC check-ins; any false information shared could open Facebook up to
additional fines and penalties, according to the FTC.
Last
month, Facebook suspended “tens of thousands” of apps for
improperly harvesting users data. The company will report its Q3 earnings on
Wednesday afternoon.
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