UK Fines Facebook Half a Million Pounds

Facebook has agreed to pay a fine of £ 500,000 for breaches of personal data protection law related to the unauthorized use of such data by Cambridge Analytica. This was announced by the Office of the British Information Commissioner (ICO), the British regulator for information rights, BNR reported.

Company CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been confronted with a number of questions by US and European lawmakers about how Cambridge political analyst consultant managed to obtain the personal data of 87 million users of a leading social network for the purpose of its research.

The Office of the Information Commissioner of the United Kingdom (ICO) imposed a small and symbolic fine last year after saying that data from at least one million British users was among information collected by Cambridge Analytica and used for political purposes.

On Wednesday, the ICO said that despite agreeing to pay the fine, Facebook did not acknowledge its responsibility in the scandal.

"The ICO’s main concern was that UK citizen data was exposed to a serious risk of harm.Protection of personal information and personal privacy is of fundamental importance, not only for the rights of individuals, but also as we now know, for the preservation of a strong democracy.," ICO Deputy Commissioner James Dipple-Johnstone said on Wednesday "We are pleased to hear that Facebook has taken, and will continue to take, significant steps to comply with the fundamental principles of data protection. With this strong commitment to protecting people’s personal information and privacy, we expect that Facebook will be able to move forward and learn from the events of this case.”, he added.

The corporation, however, noted that they were pleased that an agreement had been reached and wish that the company had done more to investigate claims about Cambridge Analytica in 2015

"We made major changes to our platform back then, significantly restricting the information which app developers could access. Protecting people’s information and privacy is a top priority for Facebook, and we are continuing to build new controls to help people protect and manage their information.”, he added.

We recall that earlier this year, Facebook was fined $ 5 billion by US regulators for the same privacy scandal.

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