Facebook has been slapped with a £500,000 fine for the role it played in the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which the data of 87m users was harvested for political purposes.
The data regulator found that the social network failed to safeguard users’ information and allowed people’s personal data to be harvested by others, constituting a breach of the Data Protection Act 1998. Had the breach occurred after May this year, Facebook may have faced a far greater fine under the new data protection law, a maximum of 4pc of global turnover or €20m (£18m), whichever was highest.
The penalty could be just the first in what might become several fines for Mark Zuckerberg as the Information Commissioner’s...