Facebook Appeals UK Data Watchdog's CA Fine

Facebook is appealing the £500k penalty issued by the UK's Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), after the Office found no evidence that UK users' data was shared with Cambridge Analytica (CA) or used in the Brexit referendum.

Earlier this year, CA was accused of illegally collecting Facebook profiles which could be matched to electoral rolls. The problems centred around data provided by users of a personality quiz app, created by Aleksandr Kogan and his firm Global Science Research (GSR), through which the Facebook data of up to 87 million people was harvested without their knowledge. Some of this data was later shared with CA's parent company, SCL, which was involved in political campaigning in the US.

The £500k fine issued last month is the maximum allowable under the Data Protection Act 1998 which applied at the time the incidents occurred - before the official start of GDPR. Initially, the ICO suggested that the personal information of at least one million UK users was among the harvested data, but it has subsequently found no evidence that UK citizens were involved in the data breach. Because of this Facebook claims that the penalty is unjustified.

Anna Benckert, Facebook's VP & Associate General Counsel, stated that: 'The ICO's investigation stemmed from concerns that UK citizens' data may have been impacted by Cambridge Analytica, yet they now have confirmed that they have found no evidence to suggest that information of Facebook users in the UK was ever shared by Dr Kogan with Cambridge Analytica, or used by its affiliates in the Brexit referendum. Therefore, the core of the ICO's argument no longer relates to the events involving Cambridge Analytica'. She also claimed that the ICO's reasoning challenges some of the basic principles of how people should be allowed to share information online, 'with implications which go far beyond just Facebook, which is why we have chosen to appeal', Benckert added.

The ICO says that even if Facebook's assertion was true, some of the US users affected would have technically been UK users, for example, if they had used Facebook while visiting Britain.