Data analytics firm , which says it can 鈥渃hange audience behaviour,鈥� had access to information on millions of Facebook users, according to the and .
Cambridge Analytica worked with the Trump campaign prior to his 2016 presidential election victory, however, the firm .
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Christopher Wylie, who used to work for Cambridge Analytica, has claimed that University of Cambridge professor Aleksandr Kogan privately built an app that gathered data from around 270,000 Facebook users who completed surveys. At the time, Facebook鈥檚 more permissive privacy settings also gave the app access to data on millions of people who were friends with those users.
In an email to staff at Cambridge University鈥檚 psychology department on Sunday, seen by 快猫短视频, Kogan said the collected data included name, location, age, gender and page likes.
Wylie claims that the data was then passed on to Cambridge Analytica without the users鈥� knowledge, and used to help target political advertising campaigns by making predictions about their personality.
But in his email, Kogan disputed the usefulness of the data, saying that many of their predictions about personality traits were significantly more likely to be wrong than right, and that using the data would do more harm to a political campaign than good.
In a statement, Facebook said that it has now . It added that it found out about the acquisition of user data by Kogan鈥檚 company, Global Science Research (GSR), in 2015. The social network alleges that Kogan lied and violated its policies.
On Saturday, Cambridge Analytica claiming that it had contracted GSR to acquire the data legitimately. 鈥淲hen it subsequently became clear that the data had not been obtained by GSR in line with Facebook鈥檚 terms of service, Cambridge Analytica deleted all data received from GSR,鈥� the firm said. However, Facebook has claimed it received reports that not all the data has been deleted.
Privacy activist Paul-Olivier Dehaye said he was bewildered as to why Facebook didn鈥檛 inform its users about the situation earlier, and that many Facebook users will be left wondering whether their own data has been gathered as a result of one of their friends using a particular app.
Jay Pinho, a commentator on advertising and political media, that the Obama 2012 election campaign also gathered Facebook user data via an app. However, users in that case would have been aware that their Facebook profiles were being accessed by an app associated with the Obama campaign. Whereas with Kogan鈥檚 app, they would have been oblivious to any link with Cambridge Analytica or its projects.
The and a parliamentary committee in the UK will to give additional testimony.
There needs to be much more oversight of the commercial use of people鈥檚 personal data, says , at University College London. He pointed out that gathering data on people鈥檚 political views was particularly sensitive.
鈥淲hen you collect political opinions you have to get people to give you explicit consent to do that,鈥� he says. 鈥淩ecently the European regulators have confirmed [鈥 that even if you infer data like political opinion, that鈥檚 considered to be collecting it.鈥�
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