1/ The blistering report from the UK Information Commissioner's Office takes aim not just at Facebook + Cambridge Analytica. It indicts the entire consumer surveillance-and-influence ecosystem -- data brokers, credit reporting agencies, even universities bit.ly/2KOJ67V
2/ The report was based on the largest investigation of its kind by a data protection authority, involving more than 40 government investigators looking into 285 people of interest. I kept imagining the boards with red string linking all the various players under investigation: 
3/ Then there were the outside forensic IT experts brought in to examine recovered materials "including dozens of servers and other equipment containing in total hundreds of terabytes of data."
4/ The ICO report comes down hard on data brokers — such as Experian — that traffic in consumers' personal details, questioning whether the companies had obtained and shared users' information in compliance with legal requirements for fairness and transparency.
5/The Information Commissioners Office said it is also investigating how major credit reporting agencies shared data with political campaigns
6/ The British said it had also launched a separate investigation into Cambridge University's Psychometric Center, which developed the psychometric profiling techniques used on Facebook users.
7/ But universities come in for some of the most withering scrutiny for failing, the British agency report says, to develop ethics and safeguards for the consumer data that academic researchers harvest from social networks and other sources:
8/ And if you want to know how your name, birth date, likes, location, friend lists, email address, and photos you were in may have been siphoned from your Facebook account, this diagram should help
9/ And, as @sheeraf and @satariano report, the UK agency plans to fine Facebook the maximum available penalty -- £500,000 -- for data security and transparency failures nyti.ms/2N35KWQ
10/ Then there's this tidbit in the British agency report saying that "a number of overseas regulators and agencies have requested updates in order to advance their own regulatory actions" -- upping the ante on expectations for the F.T.C. investigation
