Facebook has been fined £500,000 for the recent Cambridge Analytica scandal that took place. The fine has been imposed after seeing that Facebook despite being completely responsible for the data breach of more than 100 million users didn’t take any serious action regarding this manner appropriately. The fine has been imposed by the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) and was calculated using the UK’s old Data Protection Act 1998 which can levy a maximum penalty of £500,000 — ironically that’s equals to the amount Facebook earns every 18 minutes.
The news does not come as a surprise as the U.K.’s data privacy watchdog already notified the social network giant in July this year that the commission was intended to issue the maximum fine. However, Facebook accepts the fact that they could have done something better in protecting data breach of a majority of its platform users. However, the £500,000 fine is just a drop in the ocean for a company like Facebook that brought in £31.5 billion in global revenue last year.
The penalty could have been much larger had it fallen under EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), wherein a company could face a maximum fine of 20 million euros or 4% of its annual global revenue, whichever is higher, for such a privacy breach.
Facebook’s annual revenue was nearly £31.5 billion in 2017, which could have resulted in a possible fine of £1.26 billion under the GDPR rules. But luckily for Facebook that GDPR came into force in May 2018 after the timing of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. This scandal is certainly one of the deadliest of all times. And it will certainly take time for the company to get healed from it.
Also read – How to stop Facebook from Collecting your Data.
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