FB suspends Trump campaign data firm
WASHINGTON: Facebook says it has suspended the account of Cambridge Analytica, the data analysis firm hired by Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, amid reports it harvested the profile information of millions of US voters without their permission.
According to the New York Times and Britain’s Observer, the company stole information from 50 million Facebook users’ profiles in the tech giant’s biggestever data breach, to help them design software to predict and influence voters’ choices at the ballot box.
Also suspended were the accounts of its parent organisation, Strategic Communication Laboratories, as well as those of University of Cambridge psychologist Aleksandr Kogan and Christopher Wylie, a Canadian data analytics expert who worked with Kogan.
Cambridge Analytica was bankrolled to the tune of US$15 million by US hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, a major Republican donor. The Observer said it was headed at the time by Steve Bannon, a top Trump adviser until he was fired last summer.
“In 2015, we learned that ... Kogan lied to us and violated our Platform Policies by passing data from an app that was using Facebook Login to SCL/ Cambridge Analytica, a firm that does political, government and military work around the globe,” Facebook said in a posting by its vice-president and deputy general counsel Paul Grewal. Kogan also improperly shared the data with Wylie, it said.
Kogan’s app, this is your digital life, offered a personality prediction test, describing itself on Facebook as ‘a research app used by psychologists.’ Some 270,000 people downloaded the app, allowing Kogan to access information such as the city listed on their profile, or content they had ‘liked.’
“However, the app also collected the information of the test-takers’ Facebook friends, leading to the accumulation of a data pool tens of millions-strong,” the Observer reported.
Facebook later pushed back against the claim of a data breach, issuing a fresh statement that suggested the misused data was limited to those who voluntarily took the test.
“People knowingly provided their information, no systems were infiltrated, and no passwords or sensitive pieces of information were stolen or hacked,” Grewal said.
Cambridge Analytica meanwhile said it was in touch with Facebook “in order to resolve this matter as quickly as possible.” It blamed the misuse of data on Kogan and said it has since deleted all the data it received from a company he founded, Global Science Research (GSR).
“No data from GSR was used by Cambridge Analytica as part of the services it provided to the Donald Trump 2016 presidential campaign,” it said.