I’M THE SCAPEGOAT
An academic who developed the app used by Cambridge Analytica to harvest data from millions of Facebook users said Wednesday he had no idea his work would be used in Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and that he’s being scapegoated in the fallout from the affair. Alexandr Kogan, a psychology researcher at Cambridge University, told the BBC that both Facebook and Cambridge Analytica have tried to place the blame on him for violating the social media platform’s terms of service, even though Cambridge Analytica ensured him that everything he did was legal. “My view is that I’m being basically used as a scapegoat by both Facebook and Cambridge Analytica,” he said. “Honestly, we thought we were acting perfectly appropriately, we thought we were doing something that was really normal.” Kogan’s work involved modelling human behaviour through social media. In collaboration with Cambridge Analytica, he developed a Facebook-based personality survey called “This Is Your Digital Life” and paid about 200,000 people to take part. As a result, participants unknowingly gave the researchers access to the profiles of their Facebook friends, allowing them to collect data from millions more users. Kogan said Cambridge Analytica approached him to gather Facebook data and provided the legal advice that this was “appropriate.” “One of the great mistakes I did here was I just didn’t ask enough questions,” he said. “I had never done a commercial project; I didn’t really have any reason to doubt their sincerity. That’s certainly something I strongly regret now.” He said the firm paid some US$800,000 for the work, but it went to participants in the survey. “My motivation was to get a dataset I could do research on; I have never profited from this in any way personally,” he said.