Facebook faces record UK fine for data misuse
London, July 11 : The UK's data protection watchdog plans to fine Facebook 500,000 pounds ($662,954) over the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
It would be its biggest ever penalty. The social network is yet to decide if it will try to reduce the sum, BBC reported on Wednesday.
In addition, the regulator said it intended to bring a criminal action against Cambridge Analytica's defunct parent company SCL Elections.
It also said Aggregate IQ - which worked with the Vote Leave campaign - must stop processing UK citizens' data.
And it said it had also written to the UK's 11 main political parties compelling them to have their data protection practices audited.
This, the Information Commissioner's Office explained, was in part because it was concerned they could have bought lifestyle information about members of the public from data brokers, who might have not have obtained the necessary consent.
In particular, the ICO raised concern about one data broker: Emma's Diary. The firm offers medical advice to pregnant women and gift packs after babies are born.
The ICO said it was concerned about how transparent the firm had been about its political activities.
It said that the Labour Party had confirmed using the firm, but did not provide other details at this point beyond saying it intended to take some form of regulatory action.
The service's owner Lifecycle Marketing could not be reached for comment. But it has told the Guardian that it does not agree with the ICO's findings.
The ICO's action comes 16 months after it began an ongoing probe into political campaigns' use of personal data during the Brexit referendum campaign.
Over the period, it emerged that Facebook had failed to ensure that a London-based political consultancy - Cambridge Analytica - had deleted personal data harvested about millions of its members in breach of the platform's rules.
Before its collapse, Cambridge Analytica insisted it had indeed wiped the data after Facebook's erasure request in December 2015.
But the ICO said it had seen evidence that copies of the data had been shared with others.
"This potentially brings into question the accuracy of the deletion certificates provided to Facebook," it said.
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Haryana land deal: Robert Vadra appears before ED on 3rd day
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New Delhi (PTI): Robert Vadra, the businessman brother-in-law of Leader of Opposition in Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi, appeared before the ED on the third straight day on Thursday for questioning in a money laundering case linked to alleged irregularities in a 2008 Haryana land deal case.
The 56-year-old has been questioned for over ten hours in the last two days as part of the investigation and the recording of his statement process under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) will continue Thursday, officials said.
He reached the ED office in central Delhi shortly after 11 am accompanied by his wife Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, who is MP from Wayanad.
Vadra had called the ED action borne out of "political vendetta" against him and his family, and said that while he has always cooperated with the agency and furnished thousands of pages of documents, he needed a "closure" in these cases which are almost 20 years old.
The probe against Vadra is linked to a land deal in Haryana's Manesar-Shikohpur (now sector 83) in Gurugram.
The deal of February 2008 was done by a company named Skylight Hospitality Pvt Ltd, where Vadra was a director earlier, as it purchased a 3.5 acre of land in Shikohpur from Onkareshwar Properties at a price of Rs 7.5 crore.
A Congress government led by Bhupinder Singh Hooda was in power at that time. Four years later, in September 2012, the company sold the land to realty major DLF for Rs 58 crore.
The land deal got embroiled in controversy in October 2012 after IAS officer Ashok Khemka, then posted as the director general of Land Consolidation and Land Records-cum-Inspector-General of Registration of Haryana, cancelled the mutation of this categorising the transaction as violative of state consolidation Act and some related procedures.
The BJP, which was in opposition then, had termed the case an instance of "corruption" in land deals and that of "nepotism", hinting at Vadra's kinship with the first family of the Congress party.
Haryana Police had filed an FIR to probe this deal in 2018.
Vadra has been questioned multiple times by the federal probe agency in two different money laundering cases earlier.
Sources told PTI that the ED will soon file chargesheets in all these three cases being investigated against Vadra.
