Facebook faces maximum fine in British Cambridge Analytica inquiry

Lawyers have lodged a mass complaint to Australian privacy authorities on behalf of Facebook users caught up in the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

Acting Australian Information Commissioner and Acting Privacy Commissioner, Angelene Falk has previously said that the probe could take longer than the six-to-eight months it usually takes to finalise Commissioner-initiated investigations.

Damian Collins said the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) concluded that Facebook "contravened the law by failing to safeguard people's information".

Elizabeth Denham, the Information Commissioner, wrote in her accompanying report that Facebook should have done more to explain to its users why they were targeted for specific political advertisements or messaging.

Facebook is expected to receive Britain's maximum possible fine for allowing Cambridge Analytica to improperly access user data, its first penalty related to the leak of millions of users' personal information.

Facebook will get a chance to respond to the proposed penalties before the ICO releases a final decision. The tech giant is accused of not properly protecting user data and not sharing how people's data was harvested by others. The British agency said Facebook may have had a "missed opportunity" in 2014 to have thwarted Kogan's activities on the site.

Her office is leading the European investigations into how such an amount of data - most belonging to U.S. and United Kingdom residents, she says - could have ended up in the hands of a consulting firm that worked on Donald Trump's USA presidential campaign.

The watchdog also plans to bring criminal charges against Cambridge Analytica's defunct parent company SCL Elections. Among the issues they are still probing is an assertion by Cambridge Analytica that it had deleted the data, after the social media giant requested it in 2015.

Since its entanglement with Cambridge Analytica became public, Facebook has pledged to review all third-party apps on the platform while introducing new transparency measures, including an online repository of all political ads that run on the site.

SCANDAL FALLOUT, The fines are starting to come for Facebook in several countries.

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