Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, what information his Department holds on the number of UK users of Facebook who were affected by the data breach at the company that was announced on 29 September 2018.

We take both the protection of personal data and the right to privacy extremely seriously. The Data Protection Act 2018 makes our data protection laws fit for the digital age in which an ever increasing amount of data is being processed and empowers people to take control of their data. It is the responsibility of any UK organisation to identify when UK citizen's have been affected as part of a data breach and take the necessary steps to reduce harm to customers. The NCSC and ICO have been made aware of the issue concerning Facebook and are working together with the relevant authorities. The ICO, as the UK's independent regulator for data protection, is making enquiries with Facebook and their overseas counterparts to establish the scale of the breach and if any UK citizens have been affected.