"Facebook sued by Australian information watchdog over Cambridge Analytica-linked data breach," 9 Mar 2020

Australia’s information commissioner is suing Facebook over allegedly breaching the privacy of over 300,000 Australians caught up in the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

In a case lodged in the federal court on Monday, the Australian information commissioner Angelene Falk has alleged Facebook committed serious and repeated interferences with privacy in contravention of Australian privacy law because data collected by Facebook was passed onto the This is Your Digital Life app by Cambridge Analytica for political profiling, which was not what it was collected for.

Data included people’s names, dates of birth, email addresses, city location, friends list, page likes and Facebook messages for those who had granted the app access to the messages...

At the time, Facebook said 311,127 Australians between March 2014 and May 2015 had data shared with the app, accounting for 0.4% of users affected by the breach.

However, the court documents reveal just 53 people in Australia installed the app...

87m users worldwide were affected by the scandal.

The OAIC says in its court filing that the design of Facebook made it so that users were unable to consent or control over how their data was disclosed, and to date, Facebook has not been able to tell the OAIC which Australian users were affected.

The Guardian and Observer revealed data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica worked with Donald Trump’s election team and the Leave campaign in the UK Brexit referendum.

The data was used to build a software program to predict and influence voters. Facebook discovered the information had been harvested by a third party in late 2015, but failed to alert users at the time...