Twitter says it sold data access to Cambridge U. academic

Twitter Inc. sold data access to the Cambridge University academic who also obtained millions of Facebook users’ information that was later passed to a political consulting firm without the users’ consent.

Aleksandr Kogan, who created a personality quiz on Facebook to harvest information later used by Cambridge Analytica, established his own commercial enterprise, Global Science Research, or GSR. That firm was granted access to largescale public Twitter data, covering months of posts, for one day in 2015, according to Twitter.

“In 2015, GSR did have one-time API access to a random sample of public tweets from a five-month period from December 2014 to April 2015,” Twitter said in a statement to Bloomberg. “Based on the recent reports, we conducted our own internal review and did not find any access to private data about people who use Twitter.”

The company has removed Cambridge Analytica and affiliated entities as advertisers. Twitter said GSR paid for the access; it provided no further details. The U.K.-based Telegraph earlier reported that Twitter sold data to Kogan, who told the newspaper that he was in compliance with Twitter’s policies but didn’t elaborate on what level of access he received.

Twitter provides certain companies, developers and users with access to public data through its application programming interfaces, or software that requests and delivers information. The company sells the data to organizations, which often use them to analyze events, sentiment or customer service.

Enterprise customers are given the broadest data access, which includes the last 30 days of tweets or access to tweets from as far back as 2006.