Facebook has been stung with the maximum possible fine by Britain's privacy watchdog for the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
The UK's Information Commissioner's Office fined Facebook £500,000 ($645,000), the highest punishment it can dish out for a data breach.
The ICO said in July that it intended to level the fine on Facebook after Cambridge Analytica exploited the data of 87 million users harvested by developer Dr Aleksandr Kogan.
Confirmation of the penalty came on Thursday, with Information Commissioner Elizabeth Denham saying: "A company of its size and expertise should have known better and it should have done better."
The fine is, of course, tiny in the context of Facebook's revenues of more than $40 billion. Denham said it would have been much higher had Europe's GDPR rules been in force.
"We considered these contraventions to be so serious we imposed the maximum penalty under the previous legislation. The fine would inevitably have been significantly higher under the GDPR," she said.
"One of our main motivations for taking enforcement action is to drive meaningful change in how organisations handle people's personal data."
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