SCIENTIST DROPS SUIT AGAINST FACEBOOK
Aleksandr Kogan, the data scientist at the center of Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica privacy scandal, said he is dropping a defamation lawsuit against the social network rather than engage in an expensive, drawn-out legal battle. Kogan, 33, sued the social media giant in March, claiming it scapegoated him to deflect attention from its own misdeeds, thwarting his academic career in the process. The suit sought unspecified monetary damages and a retraction and correction of what Kogan said were “false and defamatory statements.” A Facebook spokesperson said the company had “no comment to share concerning this development.” The former Cambridge University psychology professor created an online personality test app in 2014 that vacuumed up the personal data of as many as 87 million Facebook users. The vast majority of them were unwitting online friends of the roughly 200,000 people Kogan says were paid about $4 to participate in his“this is your digital life” a pp. Cambridge Analytica, a political data-mining firm founded by conservative power brokers including billionaire Robert Mercer and former White House aide Steve Bannon, paid Kogan $800,000 to conduct his research and to provide the firm with a copy of its data. The project’s aim was to create voter profiles based on Facebook users’ online behavior to help its political-ad targeting, according to Christopher Wylie, a former data scientist at the firm.