Facebook under fire as UK firm harvests details of 50m users
FACEBOOK has come under fire after it was revealed a British firm harvested personal details from more than 50million accounts without users’ permission.
cambridge Analytica (CA) is said to have used the data to build a powerful software program to predict and influence choices at the ballot box.
the company played a key role in mapping out the behaviour of voters in the run-up to the 2016 US election and is also said to have been used during the EU referendum campaign earlier that year.
Yesterday, tory MP Damian collins accused Facebook of misleading the Government over how companies acquire and hold on to its users’ data. the chairman of the commons digital, culture, media and sport committee called on founder Mark Zuckerberg to appear before MPs.
the data grab involved users being paid a small sum of money to complete a survey, if they consented to share personal details through Facebook. this let researchers build psychological profiles of millions of users, according to whistleblower christopher Wylie.
He said ‘ almost none’ of the participants, who had agreed only to academic use of their data, knew the information was really being used to build a system profiling individual US voters, to target them with personalised political adverts.
the firm, led at the time by Donald trump’s key adviser Steve Bannon, has been suspended by Facebook. it is already part of a probe by the information commissioner’s Office into use of data analytics for political purposes.
Mr Wylie, a canadian analytics expert who worked with CA, told the Observer: ‘We exploited Facebook to harvest millions of people’s profiles and built models to exploit what we knew about them and target their inner demons. that was the basis that the entire company was built on.’
Mr collins said: ‘the reputation of [Facebook] is being damaged … because of their constant failure to respond with clarity and authority to the questions of genuine public interest … it’s time for Mark Zuckerberg to stop hiding behind his Facebook page.’
the data was collated via Facebook app this is Your Digital life, built by cambridge University professor Aleksandr Kogan. Hundreds of thousands of users took the survey. But the app also gathered the data of their Facebook friends, meaning it accumulated tens of millions of users’ details.
in 2015, Facebook learned the data had been passed to CA but allegedly failed to alert users and took only limited measures to secure the data.
information commissioner elizabeth Denham said she would investigate.
CA said Mr Wylie ‘ had a grudge’ and his claims were ‘pure fantasy’. it said the data was deleted after it was found it had not been obtained in line with Facebook’s terms. none of it was given to the trump campaign, CA said.
Facebook said Dr Kogan, CA and Mr Wylie’s accounts would be suspended. it announced a ‘comprehensive internal and external’ review to establish whether copies of the data still exist. Vice-president Paul Grewal said it was committed to ‘ enforcing our policies to protect people’s information’.
‘Target their inner demons’