Facebook fined million euros from Italian privacy regulator
The Italian privacy watchdog has fined Facebook one million euros in response to the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The Garante per la Protezione dei Data Personali says the data of more than 200,000 Italians has been treated unfairly.
The regulator was able to determine that 57 Italians had downloaded the app that Cambridge Analytica used to manipulate the American presidential election in 2016. The This Is Your Digital Life app allowed users to log in with their Facebook account, which also collected information from the users’ Facebook friends. As a result, the app was also able to collect information from 214,077 Italians without their knowledge or consent. Facebook acted in violation of the privacy law that Italy had in that period. That law was a precursor to the GDPR, which only came into effect in May 2018. The fine is for the way Facebook passed data to the app. According to the regulator, Cambridge Analytica has not received the data.
In March of this year, the regulator already addressed Facebook about the violation. The company then paid 52,000 euros as a settlement, but the regulator now says that the seriousness of the violation is so great that the settlement is nullified. “This amount is based on the size of the database, and on Facebook’s economic situation and the number of Italian and international users,” the regulator said in a statement.
It is not the first time that Facebook has been fined by the Italian privacy watchdog. At the end of last year, Facebook was fined ten million euros for incorrectly informing users about what information was collected with the login button, and in 2017 it was fined three million euros for integrating the data of WhatsApp users.