by  Anbar Jayadi

ABSTRACT

The Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal is an issue-in-progress in Indonesia. Indonesia is the third country that had its Facebook users’ data allegedly ‘improperly shared’ with Cambridge Analytica. This raises concerns over how Facebook (Indonesia) handles the data of its Indonesian users and its transparency to the Indonesian public. Class-action lawsuits, parliamentary hearing, and warning letters have all been started. Nevertheless, to this date, the Indonesian authorities seem at loss. The problem is twofold: coherent data protection legislation is absent (as of the writing of this paper), and law enforcement mechanisms are weak. Academic literature and reports have already discussed, in general, the existing and upcoming data protection legal framework in Indonesia. Therefore, this paper is more interested in exploring, how the Indonesian law enforcement works when it comes to data privacy cases, using the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal as a case study. The identified issues are the failure of protection of the secrecy of personal data and the exercise of the data subject’s right to sue for compensations. This paper concludes with an evaluation of forthcoming data protection challenges for Indonesia.

.