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Earlier this week Brazil announced to fine Facebook $1.6 million for improper sharing of information. According to the Consumer Protection department of the ministry, that information of 443,000 people had been shared with one of the apps called “thisisyourdigitallife”. The ministry claims that the data was shared with the app for very concerning reasons.
In response to the email, Facebook stated they are going to re-evaluate its legal options regarding this case. The company further quoted:” We are focused on protecting people’s privacy. We have also observed some changes that restricted, the information which App developers can access.”
According to the Brazilian ministry, they had launched the investigation after the 2018 Cambridge Analytica news went viral regarding misuse of user data. For now, Facebook has only 10 days to appeal for the decision. The Company is however obliged to pay the fine in thirty coming days.
As per the 2018 report thisisyourdigitallife was built by Cambridge Analytica for the 2016 US Presidential elections. The aim behind developing the app was to gather information about the users and to target them for political advertisement.
A month ago FTC or Federal Trade Commission had passed a ruling in opposition to Cambridge Analytica. According to the agency Cambridge Analytica had violated the federal rule by misleading the users of Facebook without asking their permission. Unfortunately, Facebook was charged with $5 Billion for privacy breach.
Nevertheless, Facebook is trying very hard for making its products and services end-to-end encrypted and transient so that the user data is short-lived and won’t be available for a long period.
