Facebook does not want to pay a fine for data leakage, appeals in Britain

UK Personal Data Protection Authority (ICO) last month said that Facebook was unable to protect the privacy of its users. The company, according to him, allowed a "serious violation" of the law and did not provide redress even after revealed data misuse in December 2015.

Facebook has been the target of an investigation, mainly because of a scandal about leaking information from around 87 million user accounts. The case broke out in mid-March, when it turned out that data was abused by Cambridge Analytica, a British company, in developing software tools to support Donald Trump's campaign during the election of the US president.

Cambridge Analytica should have officially developed a program to predict voters' preferences, but in fact, it was the company's attempt to influence their decision-making. The application drew private data from the profiles of tens of millions of users, and the system subsequently shaped the voters' profile, which then deliberately distributed political advertising.

There is no evidence

The ICO investigation, however, did not reveal any evidence that British citizens were involved in the case. "ICO's investigation stemmed from fears that British citizens' data could have affected the work of Cambridge Analytica, but it has now confirmed that it has found no evidence to suggest that Facebook user information in Britain, shared by Aleksandr Kogan and Cambridge Analytica or her subsidiaries in a referendum on the departure of Britain from the European Union, "said Anna Benckert, legal counsel for Facebook.

"This is why the core of their argumentation is unrelated to Cambridge Analytica's events, but instead challenges some of the basic principles of how people should be allowed to share information online, and this problem goes far beyond Facebook, so we have decided to withdraw, "Benckert added.

She explained that, according to ICO theory, for example, people would not be able to forward an e-mail or a message without the consent of each person to the original thread of recipients.

As Reuters has already said, the fine is rather symbolic. Facebook last year increased its profit by more than half to nearly $ 15.9 billion . Facebook is the largest social network in the world that employs more than 2.2 billion people at least once a month.