Facebook is a major social media platform that is used worldwide by 2.13 billion people.
Cambridge Analytica have caused widespread panic to the 87 million people effected for political purposes. They were supposedly working for Donald Trump’s political campaign via an online survey that was created by a research associate at Cambridge University, Mr Kogan.
The ICO, Elizabeth Denham said "Facebook has failed to provide the kind of protections they are required to under the Data Protection Act, fines and prosecutions punish the bad actors, but my real goal is to effect change and restore trust and confidence in our democratic system."
Had this scandal occurred in May, they would have been fined 4% of their global turnover or £18 million depending on which one was most substantial. This half a million pounds fine is no financial burden to Facebook as statistics have shown that £500,000 revenue is earnt every 18 minutes.
Erin Egan, chief privacy officer at Facebook said, “We should have done more to investigate claims about Cambridge Analytica and take action in 2015.” In 2015 Facebook requested that both parties deleted all the data that was stolen, however they never followed through with their actions.
Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg has been to meetings both with the US and EU lawmakers about this scandal.
Facebook has since edited their app to restrict the amount of data that people can harvest from it. Cambridge Analytica are constantly being reviewed by British Lawmakers.
There is speculation about a caution message being sent to 11 different political parties to inspect their data protection practices.