Facebook facing over $600,000 in fines in the UK for Cambridge Analytica scandal

Tuesday, reports surfaced that the United Kingdom’s Information Commissioner’s office has issued a fine to Facebook for $664,000 or about GBP 500,000. The office finds that Facebook lacked the privacy protections necessary to catch Cambridge Analytica before it was too late.

The Washington Post reports that today’s announcement of the fine is preliminary and the final amount could change going into further discussions between UK regulators and Facebook. A follow-up report is expected sometime in October.

A statement from Facebook’s chief privacy officer admitted that Facebook “should have done more to investigate claims about Cambridge Analytica and take action in 2015.” A 40 page report created by British regulators says that Facebook failed by allowing the parties involved with the University of Cambridge to build an app that collects data about Facebook users and their friends.

Facebook will be put under more scrutiny by UK regulators involving “evidence that copies of the data/parts of it also seem to have been share with other parties and on other systems beyond” despite Cambridge Analytica’s declaration that it had wiped all the data that it was asked to.

European regulators have been going hard on tech companies lately. Just yesterday, we saw that the EU’s competition regulators think that Google shouldn’t require OEMs to set Google services as the default Browser and Search engine on Android devices. Google might face hefty fines for alleged anti-competition policies.

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