Italy stings Facebook with $1.1M fine for Cambridge Analytica data misuse

Italy’s data protection watchdog has issued Facebookwith a €1 million (~$1.1M) fine for violations of local privacy law attached to the Cambridge Analytica data misuse scandal.

Last year it emerged that up to 87 million Facebook users had had their data siphoned out of the social media giant’s platform by an app developer working for the controversial (and now defunct) political data company, Cambridge Analytica.

The offences in question occurred prior to Europe’s tough new data protection framework, GDPR, coming into force — hence the relatively small size of the fine in this case, which has been calculated under Italy’s prior data protection regime. (Whereas fines under GDPR can scale as high as 4% of a company’s annual global turnover.)

Reached for comment a Facebook spokesperson said:“We have said before that we wish we had done more to investigate claims about Cambridge Analytica in 2015. However, evidence indicates that no Italian user data was shared with Cambridge Analytica. Dr Kogan only shared data with Cambridge Analytica in relation to US users. We made major changes to our platfo