Facebook has been fined 6.7 billion won (about $6 million) for sharing Korean user data without their consent.
The Personal Information Protection Commission (PIPC) said the US company shared data of at least 3.3 million of its 18 million users in Korea with other companies without their consent from May 2012 to June 2018.
The committee said it would also file a complaint against Facebook for violating local personal information.
The information shared by Facebook included usernames, academic backgrounds, professional information, place of origin, and personal life status.
When users logged into other third-party apps using their Facebook accounts, information and that of their friends was shared with the services they were using, PIPC said. Those friends were unaware that their information was being shared with those services without permission , it said.
“A user agreed to share their information with a specific service when they logged into their Facebook account. However, the user’s friends did not, and were unaware that their own data,” the committee said.
These third-party apps then used the data provided by Facebook without users' permission to make customized ads and display them on Facebook. Facebook ultimately made money illegally by sharing users' data without consent , the PIPC said.
Facebook also stores users' password data without encryption and does not regularly notify users when the company has access to data , he added.
The commission also said that Facebook submitted false or incomplete documents during the investigation, which made investigation Facebook was fined 66 million won for these obstructions.
Facebook said it fully cooperated with the PIPC investigation and said it would release an official response after fully reviewing the decision .
The investigation against Facebook was launched in 2018 by the Korea Communications Commission, the country's telecommunications regulator , following the Cambridge Analytica scandal . The regulator handed the case over to the PIPC.
Source: zdnet.com
