By: Meera Narendra
July 13, 2019
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has approved a record $5 billion settlement with Facebook following an investigation into allegations of data privacy violations.
The fine follows after an investigation opened into Facebook’s data practices March 2018, once news broke about the political consultancy firm, Cambridge Analytica, improperly accessing the data of tens of millions of Facebook users.
The UK-based firm had created an app that linked with Facebook which would acquire personal information about users through a personality quiz. The quiz had been designed to harvest users’ data to create political advertising material with which account holders were targeted in the run up to Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.
Additionally the app gained information from both consenting users and from all those users’ friends, without their consent or knowledge.
The investigation centred on whether Facebook had violated a 2011 consent decree, under which Facebook are required to explicitly notify users and gain “express consent” to share their data.
The record $5 billion fine is the largest ever imposed by the FTC, although critics have argued that the fine will hardly impact the tech giant.