Academic given data on 57 bn ‘friendships’

Facebook provided Aleksandr Kogan, the researcher at the centre of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, with an anonymised, aggregate dataset of 57 billion friendships forged on the social media platform in 2011.

Kogan was recently suspended from Facebook for the data harvesting scam. Cambridge Analytica’s former head Alexander Nix has been secretly filmed by undercover reporters boasting of using dirty tricks to swing elections in numerous countries.

Facebook provided the dataset of “every friendship formed in 2011 in every country in the world at the national aggregate level” to Kogan’s University of Cambridge laboratory for a study on international friendships published in Personality and Individual Differences in 2015, The Guardian reported on Friday.

Two Facebook employees were named as co-authors of the study, alongside researchers from Cambridge, Harvard and the University of California. Kogan was publishing under the name Aleksandr Spectre at the time.

A Cambridge statement on the study’s publication noted the paper was “the first output of ongoing research collaborations between Spectre’s lab in Cambridge and Facebook”. Facebook did not respond to The Guardian’s queries about whether there was any other collaboration.

“The data that was shared was literally numbers – numbers of how many friendships were made between pairs of countries – ie x number of friendships made between the US and UK,” Facebook spokeswoman Christine Chen said. “There was no personally identifiable information included in this data.”

Chen said Facebook had ended its working relationship with Kogan after learning that he violated the company’s terms of service for his unrelated work as an app developer. HTC

NEW DELHI: FACEBOOK DOWNPLAYED THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE DATASET, WHICH IT SAID WAS SHARED WITH KOGAN IN 2013.