Cambridge Analytica – Facebook: One of the analytics firms that helped Donald Trump win the election harvested private information from 50 million Facebook profiles without their permission. The story broke over the weekend, when Facebook announced late Friday that the firm Cambridge Analytica no longer had access to the social network because it was using the data to determine what each voter in their constituency voted for. Major news sites, including The New York Times , the Guardian’s Observer , and the UK’s Channel 4 News , have all shown evidence and documents from a former Cambridge Analytica employee that corroborate their claims. The New York Times called the incident “one of the largest data leaks in the social network’s history,” and later called it a “breach.” While most U.S. states have laws requiring businesses to promptly report data breaches, Facebook reportedly did not notify any regulators about the data breach. Facebook’s general counsel, Paul Grewal, said it would be “completely false” to call the incident a “data breach.” Carole Cadwalladr, who co-authored the Guardian article, reported in a tweet that Facebook had threatened to sue the newspaper, saying it was “false and defamatory” to call the incident a data breach. Grewal said Facebook learned earlier this week that London-based Cambridge Analytica, which is used for targeted political messaging campaigns by parent company Strategic Communication Laboratories (SCL), had misused data collected from 270,000 Facebook users. This data (Facebook profile names, locations, information about friends, and the content they liked) was collected by a supposedly benign personality prediction app developed by Aleksandr Kogan, a Russian-American researcher and lecturer at the University of Cambridge. Kogan gave this app data to Cambridge Analytica without users’ permission, in violation of Facebook’s policies. Facebook said it first learned of the breach in 2015. Instead of notifying users that their personal data had been compromised, Facebook sent a letter to Kogan and Cambridge Analytica in August 2016 demanding that they delete the data. The letter was sent just days before Trump hired Steve Bannon, a former vice president at Cambridge Analytica, to run the campaign. Although Facebook said it had received assurances that the data had been deleted, the company did not verify the responses it received. “Several days ago, we received reports that despite the certifications we were given, not all of the data was deleted,” Grewal said. Facebook also suspended the SCL and Cambridge Analytica pages, as we reported above, from the social network. Facebook’s statement came just hours before the news broke on Saturday. “We are committed to strictly enforcing our policies to protect our members’ information,” Facebook’s Grewal said.
All of this is the latest in a long-running saga of what happened before and during the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
Intelligence officials said in January that the Russian government used social media to spread disinformation during the election to help Trump defeat Hillary Clinton.
Many tech companies, including Twitter and Google, have faced criticism for failing to curb the spread of “fake news” on their platforms, allowing Russians to buy ads to spread disinformation from their platforms.
