Facebook charged with £500,000

Facebook has been fined £500,000 by UK's Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) for allowing Cambridge Analytica to improperly gather and misuse data of 85 million users.

Decision by information commissioner comes after Cambridge Analytica scandal. The ICO announced in March 2018 that data from at least 1 million US citizens were misused and Facebook has failed to make suitable checks on apps and developers using its platform.

The cause of punishment to Facebook is essentially for sharing the information without informed consent from 2007 to 2014, hitting it with the maximum fine possible following a scandal which erupted in March this year. The fine has imposed on Facebook is maximum allowable punishment under UK law. The penalty could have been much larger had it fallen under EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) but that GDPR came into force in May 2018 after the timing of the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

The ICO announcement on Thursday upholds its initial decision in July. The fine, which represents a drop in the ocean for a company that brought in $40.7bn (£31.5bn) in global revenue in 2017, was the maximum available to the regulator under old data protection legislation. Facebook is already facing an investigation by the Irish data regulator over an unconnected data breach discovered last month, which could result in a record fine.

This proves how important it is for an organisation to maintain the security of their user’s data. Laws related to cybersecurity are becoming more aggressive. Going forward, Governments of other nations and experts says, the Indian government should take this as a lesson and pass similar reforms as the GDPR so that organisations in India are also made to improve their cybersecurity infrastructure because as of now, fines are not even close to this strict.