Facebook will pay a £500,000 fine imposed by the UK’s data protection watchdog for its role in the Cambridge Analytica scandal. As part of the deal, Facebook will make no admission of liability.
The US firm said it “wished it had done more to investigate Cambridge Analytica” earlier. Facebook’s legal team underscored that the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office has not discovered evidence EU user data was transferred to Cambridge Analytica but committed to cooperate with the ongoing investigation on the use of data analytics for political purposes.
Cambridge researcher Dr Aleksandr Kogan and his company GSR used a personality quiz to harvest the Facebook data of up to 87 million people, a database later shared with the London-based Cambridge Analytica. The latter was linked both with the Leave campaign in the UK and the 2016 Donald Trump Presidential campaign.