Campaign group Fair Vote U.K. announced Saturday that it is preparing a lawsuit against Facebook on behalf of users whose data was used by the tech giant without their consent during the Brexit referendum campaign.
The suit follows the leak of an interim report on fake news from the culture, media and sport select committee that underlined the ease with which companies could harvest user data without consent.
Fair Vote U.K. said it hoped that as many of the 1.1 million people impacted by the data breach as possible would join their lawsuit in an effort to claim damages from Facebook.
“It is now abundantly clear the status quo with regard to how we hold internet giants to account does not work. The solution is urgent reform to properly regulate and oversee companies like Facebook. Because the breaches took place before the GDPR came into effect, the fines are simply not great enough to deter this behaviour,” said Kyle Taylor, director of Fair Vote U.K. and a claimant on the file, in a statement.
The U.K.s Information Commissioners Office in early July issued a £500,000 fine against the social media giant over the Cambridge Analytica data scandal. The data watchdog said that Facebook had broken the countrys data protection laws by offering consumer information to a third party app.
