The fine, and the follow-up questions that U.K. government officials are now asking, are a signal that Facebook — after months of grilling on both sides of the Atlantic amid a wider investigation — is not yet off the hook in the U.K. The UK's Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has confirmed it will impose the maximum £500,000 ($662,000) fine on Facebook, after finding it "effectively broke" the 1998 Data Protection Act by failing to keep user data safe. Alongside the fine, the ICO will also pose questions to the social media site, including who had access to the data scraped from Facebook, and who subsequently had access to it. Facebook is currently under investigation in a separate EU Commission probe into whether its privacy policy was breached during the 2016 US presidential election.
The UK's Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has confirmed it will impose the maximum £500,000 ($662,000) fine on Facebook, after finding it "effectively broke" the 1998 Data Protection Act by failing to keep user data safe. Alongside the fine, the ICO will also pose questions to the social media site, including who had access to the data scraped from Facebook, and who subsequently had access to it. Facebook is currently under investigation in a separate EU Commission probe into whether its privacy policy was breached during the 2016 US presidential election.