FACEBOOK DATA MADE ‘NO SENSE’ FOR ELECTION
▶ ‘Dr Spectre’ downplays value of his operation at UK parliament committee
The University of Cambridge academic who developed an application to harvest Facebook data dismissed the social-media giant’s claims against him as a public-relations stunt.
American-born Aleksandr Kogan told British politicians that the Facebook information he gathered would not have been useful for helping Donald Trump to win the US election.
Mr Kogan testified before a UK parliamentary committee yesterday and said the results of the data were so broad that they could not be used to identify people or target undecided voters.
“I believe the project we did makes little to no sense if the goal is to run targeted ads on Facebook,” he told the digital, culture, media and sports select committee chaired by Damian Collins.
“In fact, the platform’s tools provide companies with a far more effective pathway to target people based on their personalities than using scores from users from our work.”
Mr Kogan created a personality quiz app to collect Facebook information that also scooped up information about the participants’ online friends, putting the psychologist, who also goes by the name Dr Spectre, at the centre of the Facebook crisis.
British data company Cambridge Analytica has been accused of using details supplied by Mr Kogan, involving 87 million Facebook users without their knowledge, when the company was hired to assist in Mr Trump’s 2016 campaign.
Facebook and Cambridge Analytica blame Mr Kogan for data misuse, but he pointed the finger back at the companies yesterday, claiming he was a scapegoat.
“I think they realise that their platform has been mined left and right by thousands of others, and I was just the unlucky person that ended up somehow linked to the Trump campaign,” he told Mr Collins.
“I think they realise all this, but PR is PR and they’re trying to manage the crisis, and it’s convenient to point the finger at a single entity and try to paint the picture that this is a rogue agent.”
Cambridge Analytica did not respond to a request for comment from The National.
At a press conference yesterday after Mr Kogan’s testimony, spokesman Clarence Mitchell described claims about Cambridge Analytica as a “torrent of misinformation” and “pernicious falsehoods”.
Mr Mitchell also argued that the data for which his company paid was not useful, nor was it a factor in the Trump election campaign. Cambridge Analytica is no “Bond villain”, he said.
Cambridge Analytica is also under scrutiny over campaigning for the 2016 UK referendum when Britons voted to leave the EU.
Mr Kogan said he hired a market research company called Qualtrics to recruit up to 300,000 people to take the personality quiz used to collect the Facebook data.
His company was paid £230,000 (Dh1.2 million) by SCL, Cambridge Analytica’s parent company, to provide predictive analysis.
But Mr Kogan said the data did not yield valuable results when used by Republican candidate Ted Cruz, and in his opinion it was unlikely that it was helpful in the Trump campaign.
The psychologist said that he did not draw a salary from GSR, the company he founded to do the research, but that he was allowed to keep data gathered on the project.
Mr Kogan has previously admitted to performing research work for St Petersburg State University, but has denied any link between work funded by the Russian government and his research for Cambridge Analytica.
Christopher Wylie, the Cambridge Analytica whistle-blower, is due to appear before US politicians.