In the latest news covering Facebook, CEO Mark Zuckerberg's company has been fined £500,000-roughly $656,185-for failure to keep user's data private by leaking information to another company, Cambridge Analytica.
BBC UK also reports UK data watchdog ICO will file criminal charges against the now-defunct SCL Elections, of which Cambridge Analytica was once a subsidiary.
The problems stemmed upon discovery that Cambridge Analytica was leaking potential voter information to the highest bidder. It was also discovered that a lot of other user information-ones that political parties and other interested buyers certainly didn't need-were included in the information sale.
Early this year, Facebook had already earned the amount needed to pay off the fine.
The Guardian says that Facebook isn't out of the woods yet. The £500,000 fine is just the beginning; due to the timeline of the breaches, the fine should actually be around the neighborhood of $1.9 billion. That is certainly a lot more than the paltry fine issued by the ICO, which the Data Protection Act of 1998 pegged.
Speaking on a radio program, information commissioner Elizabeth Denham cleared that the billion dollar fine is accurate. She further stated that the fines are not all about money, though. The fines are there to set an example-to say that snooping into people's private information is not okay and that everyone has a right to know that the information they enter into Internet data forms is safe.
In the first place, snooping into people's preference for use by politicians running in the elections isn't exactly right. Elections are meant to be fair by restricting information which politicians could use to gain a foot above the other competitors. By using code which siphons users' data, the system is damaged and it also opens the door for people with malicious intent to use these data for their own gains.
Cambridge Analytica has already said that it wiped the data upon Facebook requesting for it to be erased way back in 2015. However, the damage had already been done-copies of the data had already been relayed to companies and groups for whatever use they may have for it.
Summary: Facebook is brought to task by the British watchdog ICO, fining it £500,000 on account of the breach of data privacy it had done together with Cambridge Analytica.
