UK to hit Facebook with £500,000 fine, flags legal action against Cambridge Analytica

British authorities have hit Facebook with a £500,000 fine and flagged court action against Cambridge Analytica.

A general view of the office building that used to be occupied by the now defunct Cambridge Analytica. Picture: Getty

British authorities have hit Facebook with the maximum possible fine of £500,000 (~ $900,000) and flagged the criminal prosecution of controversial political consultancy Cambridge Analytica over a data breach that exposed the personal information of 87m people across the world.

The UK Information Commissioner’s Office said it was also investigating an insurance company run by Arron Banks, a major backer of the leave side in 2016’s Brexit referendum, to see if it had illegally shared personal customer information with the campaign.

It is continuing to probe privacy breaches by leave campaigners and is looking into the collection and sharing of data by the remain side, the ICO said in an interim report released this morning.

It is considering both regulatory and criminal issues — including possible charges of perverting the course of justice against people who failed to comply with its demands for information during the investigation.

Facebook has escaped a larger fine of up to 4 per cent of its global turnover because the breach occurred before new tough European rules that came into effect in May and provide for a fine of up to 4 per cent of global turnover — or US$1.6bn in Facebook’s case.

The UK action against Facebook comes amid increasing pressure on the social networking behemoth on fronts including privacy, its promotion of fake news and its predatory behaviour towards news publishers.

It follows news yesterday that lawyers have lodged a privacy complaint with the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner on behalf of more than 300,000 locals whose data was accessed by Cambridge Analytica.

The OAIC is already conducting its own investigation of the breach, launched on her own initiative by acting Privacy Commissioner Angelene Falk in early April.

UK Information Commissioner Elizabeth Denham said the country was “at a crossroads” in the use and misuse of personal data and called for an “ethical pause” in the expansion of big data technology to give society time to catch up.

“Trust and confidence in the integrity of our democratic processes risk being disrupted because the average voter has little idea of what is going on behind the scenes,” she said.

“New technologies that use data analytics to micro-target people give campaign groups the ability to connect with individual voters.

“But this cannot be at the expense of transparency, fairness and compliance with the law.

“Fines and prosecutions punish the bad actors, but my real goal is to effect change and restore trust and confidence in our democratic system.”

The breach occurred between 2013 and 2015 through a Facebook app called “This is my Digital Life”, which harvested the personal information of both people who took the digital quiz and their friends.

The personal information of about 50 million people, including more than 300,000 Australians, was then made available to Cambridge Analytica, which is currently at the centre of a political storm in the UK over its role working for the leave campaign in 2016’s Brexit referendum.

Cambridge Analytica, founded by former Donald Trump adviser Steve Bannon, then allegedly used the data, which included political views, religious beliefs and “likes”, to build a tool that predicted personalities and for targeted advertising campaigns.

In 2016 the company worked on both the Leave campaign and Mr Trump’s successful tilt at the US presidency.