From PC Mag: The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) in the UK, which is an independent body for upholding information rights, has fined Facebook the maximum £500,000 (approximately $646,000) due to the company's handling of the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
Facebook allowed developers of the personality app "thisisyourdigitallife" to access personal information of both users and their Facebook friends without consent, and then failed to keep the information secure by allowing Dr Aleksandr Kogan and his company GSR to harvest data from 87 million people worldwide.
The ICO goes on to describe how "a subset of this data was later shared with other organisations, including SCL Group, the parent company of Cambridge Analytica who were involved in political campaigning in the US."
When Facebook discovered the data misuse in December of 2015, which affected at least one million UK users, Facebook didn't take immediate action. SCL Group was only suspended by the social network in 2018. Elizabeth Denham, Information Commissioner, said that because of Facebook's "size and expertise [it] should have known better and it should have done better."
Denham added that, "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."
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