The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has announced that Facebook will be paying a fine worth $5 billion to settle their privacy concerns.
In addition, it was stated that the social media giant should likewise establish an independent privacy committee that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will not be overseeing.
March 2018 marked the beginning of FTC’s probe as they have been studying and scrutinizing reports and allegations that political consultancy Cambridge Analytica had improperly gathered data of over 87 million Facebook users – which then expanded to include issues including data on facial recognition.
The fine amounting to $5 billion sets a record for the biggest amount of fines to be imposed for breaching consumer privacy.
“Despite repeated promises to its billions of users worldwide that they could control how their personal information is shared, Facebook undermined consumers’ choices,” said FTC Chairman Joe Simons.
The FTC chairman furthered that the steep fine is intended to shape “Facebook’s entire privacy culture to decrease the likelihood of continued violations”.
What earlier seemed to be a harmless online personality quiz turned out to be a data farm as FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection has found out during its investigations of the social media platform. It was then found out that the personal data of the users were then illegally harvested and sold to a data analytics firm – Cambridge Analytica.
Following those reports, there have been several claims that the data had been used to influence the outcome of the 2016 US presidential elections as well as the UK Brexit polls.
While only around 270,000 took the quiz, Whistleblower Christopher Wylie alleges that the data of around 50 million users, most of who are based in the US, were harvested without their consent from their friend networks.
