Facebook suspends Trump election data firm that accessed millions of user profiles

SCL, Kogan and Wylie are now all banned from the social media platform.

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Wylie was quoted in The Observer as saying: “We exploited Facebook to harvest millions of people’s profiles”.

The more than 50 million profiles represented about a third of active North American Facebook users, and almost a quarter of potential US voters, at the time, the Observer said. “Cambridge Analytica was supposed to be the arsenal of weapons to fight that culture war”.

USA presidential candidate Hillary Clinton termed the polls as “a project” of Cambridge Analytica when the August 8 elections were annulled by the Supreme Court.

“We are aware that Dr Kogan established his own company, Global Science Research (GSR), of which SCL/Cambridge Analytica was a client”, its statement said. The Observer investigation also called into question the veracity of evidence given by Facebook and Cambridge Analytica to investigators – not least an official British political inquiry (Byline.com). This was corroborated by former Cambridge employees, associates, and documents.

“It weighs on me that I played a pivotal role in setting up a company that I think has done a lot of harm to the democratic process in a lot of countries”, Wylie said.

Cambridge Analytica says it uses “behavioural microtargeting”, or combining analysis of people’s personalities with demographics, to predict and influence mass behaviour. Kogan’s app, “thisisyourdigitallife”, which claimed to be a research app used by psychologists, had gathered information from 270,000 Facebook users.

“For the avoidance of doubt, no data [from Prof Kogan] was used in the work we did in the 2016 USA presidential election”, it added. Carroll has been digging into the company’s practices since early 2017 in an effort to understand what data it has and how it was obtained.

The final section of Grewal’s post has enumerated measures to improve the profile experience and account the safety of all the Facebook users. The decision was reinforced by Trump’s campaign manager, Steve Bannon, who is also a former vice president of Cambridge Analytica.

The news has led to the United Kingdom probing Facebook in the issue. Cambridge Analytica, Kogan and Wylie all certified to us that they destroyed the data.

In an unprecedented move, Facebook announced it is suspending the political data analytics firm, Cambridge Analytica, from the social media site. Cambridge Analytica states that Facebook users gave permission when signing up to its services; however, Facebook does not agree and has stated, as quoted by The Washington Post, that “misleading people or misusing information” is in violation of Facebook’s policies. “Cambridge Analytica only receives and uses data that has been obtained legally and fairly”.

“Once it’s taken, it’s out in the world, it can be copied, it can be stored elsewhere – we just don’t know what’s happened to that data”, Cadwalladr said Saturday.

Facebook has not commented on why it did not publicly disclose the initial abuse. Still, this tarnishes Facebook’s record somewhat.

The suspension appears temporary pending the outcome of Facebook’s investigation.

Yet, in recent days, Facebook said it received reports that – contrary to the certifications it had received – the firm had not deleted all its data.

It’s not that people don’t care about privacy; they do, as much or more than ever.

“It amazes me that they are trying to make this about nomenclature”.