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Facebook co-founder, President and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, testifies before the House Committee on Trade and Energy at the Rayburn House Office Building at Capitol Hill on April 11, 2018 in Washington, DC.
Yasin Ozturk | Anadolu Agency | Getty Images
The Federal Trade Commission has approved a settlement of about $ 5 billion with Facebook following the Cambridge Analytica company scandal in 2018, said a person familiar with the issue at The Wall Street Journal. Several other media outlets reported the approval separately.
The fine is the largest ever imposed by the FTC on a technology company. Previously, in 2012, Google had agreed to pay a $ 22.5 million fine for its privacy practices. The fine would represent about 9% of Facebook's revenue for 2018.
Facebook had already blamed the FTC's $ 3 billion fine, a non-recurring item, on the company's first-quarter results.
The FTC approved the settlement by a 3 to 3 vote, in agreement with Republicans for and against Democrats, and will now be reviewed by the Justice Department, the report said.
The FTC and Facebook declined to comment on CNBC.
The FTC began probing Facebook in March 2018 as a result of information that the Cambridge Analytica policy consulting firm would have had access to data from 87 million Facebook users. The agency feared that Facebook had violated the terms of a 2011 agreement, under which Facebook was to give users very clear notifications when their data was shared with third parties.
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