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Facebook downplayed Cambridge Analytica data scandal
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IANS | 24 Aug, 2019
Facebook in 2015 was aware that
UK-based political consultancy firm Cambridge Analytica may have been
gathering users' personal data but downplayed the whole episode till a
newspaper revealed the truth three months later, show new documents.
According
to a report in CNET on Friday, internal emails by Facebook Deputy
General Counsel Paul Grewal, made available by the Attorney General for
the District of Columbia, revealed Facebook was concerned about the
"sketchy" Cambridge Analytica in September 2015.
The email correspondence started in September 2015 and ran through February 2016.
The
Guardian first reported that Cambridge Analytica was supporting Ted
Cruz's campaign using Facebook data through an online quiz. The
political research firm later worked on US President Donald Trump's
campaign.
"We suspect many of these companies are doing similar
types of scraping, the largest and most aggressive on the conservative
side being Cambridge Analytica, a sketchy (to say the least) data
modelling company that has penetrated our market deeply," read an email
dated September 22, 2015.
In a blog post late on Friday, Grewal
said that they agree with the District of Columbia Attorney General to
jointly make public a September 2015 document in which Facebook
employees discuss public data scraping.
"We believe this document
has the potential to confuse two different events surrounding our
knowledge of Cambridge Analytica. There is no substantively new
information in this document and the issues have been previously
reported," Grewal defended.
According to him, these are two distinct issues.
"One
involved unconfirmed reports of scraping -- accessing or collecting
public data from our products using automated means -- and the other
involved policy violations by Aleksandr Kogan, an app developer who sold
user data to Cambridge Analytica," he elaborated.
Facebook said it was not aware that Kogan sold data to Cambridge Analytica until December 2015.
"That
is a fact that we have testified to under oath, that we have described
to our core regulators, and that we stand by today," said Grewal.
In
September 2015, a Facebook employee shared unsubstantiated rumours from
a competitor of Cambridge Analytica, which claimed that the data
analytics company was scraping public data.
An engineer looked into this concern and was not able to find evidence of data scraping.
According to Facebook, the first indication of Kogan's involvement didn't come until December 2015, three months later.
"Cambridge Analytica was a clear lapse for us, which we have worked hard to address," said Grewal.
Cambridge Analytica harvested data through an app called "thisisyourdigitallife" that offered personality predictions.
The
Netflix documentary "The Great Hack" reveals the sordid tale of
UK-based and now defunct political consultancy firm Cambridge Analytica
and its role in swaying US voters in the 2016 presidential elections
which brought Trump to power via illegally accessing data of 87 million
Facebook users.
In April 2018, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg
testified in front of the US Congress that it learned in 2015 that
Cambridge Analytica had bought data from an app developer on Facebook
that people had shared it with.
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