Today in Facebook

It's been pretty quiet on the Facebook front lately, with FB's shareholders even driving their share price up, apparently in the belief that the worst was over. Today, however, it's looking like that burst of optimism might have been premature.

As reported by the Globe and Mail:

Britain’s privacy commissioner plans to fine Facebook for violating data protection laws and bar Canada’s AggregateIQ from handling data belonging to British citizens as part of a sweeping investigation into how personal data have been used during election campaigns.

The country’s Information Commission Office has spent months investigating how political consultants at Cambridge Analytica obtained personal data from 87 million Facebook users and then used that information to target voters during elections in the United States and Britain. In a report on its findings to be released Wednesday, the agency said it is targeting Facebook with a £500,000 ($871,000) fine for failing to properly handle personal data and for failing to respond in a robust way when the company found out about the scale of the data harvesting.

The ICO’s findings represent the first action by a national regulator against Facebook over the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

The fine is the largest allowed by UK law, although The Reg describes it as "18 mins of profit" for Facebook, which is actually more than I expected considering how gigantic FB have become. One thing that's been pretty clear for some time, though, is that FB appear to have violated laws in any number of jurisdictions worldwide, including the U.S., the EU, Canada, and China, just for openers. This fine from the U.K. is likely only the first of many.

The fact that the largest penalty available to UK regulators amounts to chump change for the global tech giants they're ostensibly regulating provides a very clear demonstration of just how far behind the times our legal framework is. The world needs better tools for controlling these emerging mega-corps, and quickly.