According a statement by the UK’s information regulatory watchdog on Wednesday, Facebook has agreed to pay the £500,000 (Rs 5.57 crore) fine for its role in the Cambridge Analytica data scandal that saw the data of up to 87 million users harvested and used to influence voters during the 2016 US Presidential elections.
While most of the affected users were in the US, many were from other countries with one million coming from the UK.
According to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), Facebook and the watchdog have reached an agreement to withdraw their appeals against each other. Facebook agrees to pay the fine but makes no admission of liability in relation to the appeal against it.
The ICO began their investigation in 2017, and issued a monetary penalty against Facebook Inc and Facebook Ireland Ltd under section 5A of the Data Protection Act 1998 to the sum of £500,000.
In November 2018, Facebook filed an appeal with the First-Tier Tribunal against the fine, following which, in June 2019, the Tribunal issued an interim decision asking the ICO to disclose its decision-making process so as to prove that procedural fairness was followed with no bias, The ICO appealed against that decision in September of this year.
The ICO’s Deputy Commissioner, James Dipple-Johnstone welcomed the development and said, "The ICO welcomes the agreement reached with Facebook for the withdrawal of their appeal against our Monetary Penalty Notice and agreement to pay the fine. 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. 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."
Facebook’s Director and Associate General Counsel, Harry Kinmonth, said:
“We are pleased to have reached a settlement with the ICO. As we have said before, we wish we 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. The ICO has stated that it has not discovered evidence that the data of Facebook users in the EU was transferred to Cambridge Analytica by Dr Kogan. However, we look forward to continuing to cooperate with the ICO’s wider and ongoing investigation into the use of data analytics for political purposes.”
Now, under the agreement, both parties drop their appeals. The ICO will continue its investigation, as parts of the same had been put on hold as per the ICO’s direction.
