Academic behind FB row says political influence exaggerated

London, March 21

The consultancy at the heart of a storm over Facebook data greatly exaggerated its role in Donald Trump’s 2016 US presidential victory and would not have been able to sway an election result, the academic who provided the data said.

Facebook has been rocked this week by a whistleblower who said that Cambridge Analytica, a Britain-based firm hired by Trump for his election campaign, had improperly accessed information on millions of Facebook users to build detailed profiles on American voters.

The revelation has knocked nearly $50 billion off Facebook’s stock market value in two days and hit the shares of Twitter and Snap over fears that a failure by big tech firms to protect personal data could deter advertisers and users, and invite tougher regulation.

Facebook and Cambridge Analytica have both blamed Aleksandr Kogan, a psychologist at Cambridge University who gathered the data by running a survey app on Facebook.

Kogan said he was being made a scapegoat by Facebook and Cambridge Analytica, saying the services provided by the political consultancy had been greatly exaggerated. “I think what Cambridge Analytica has tried to sell (to politicians) is magic, and they’ve made claims that this is incredibly accurate and it tells you everything there is to tell about you. But I think the reality is it’s not that,” he said. 

Kogan’s smartphone application, “thisisyourdigitallife,” offered a personality prediction, and billed itself on Facebook as “a research app used by psychologists”. Facebook says Kogan then violated its policies by passing the data to Cambridge Analytica for commercial use, saying on Friday he “lied to us”. Cambridge Analytica said it destroyed the data once it realised the information did not adhere to data protection rules.

Cambridge Analytica has denied various allegations made about its business practices in recent media reports.

Alexander Nix, the head of Cambridge Analytica, had said in a secretly recorded video broadcast on Tuesday that his company had played a decisive role in Trump’s election victory. Reports have put the total number of Facebook profiles collected at around 50 mn users. — Reuters 

About data breach scandal 

• Consultancy firm Cambridge Analytica allegedly used Facebook users’ data to unfairly influence poll results by psychological manipulation, entrapment techniques and fake news campaigns
• Cambridge University researcher Aleksandr Kogan and his company Global Science Research created an app called “thisisyourdigitallife” in 2014
• The users were paid to take a psychological test and the app collected the data; it also gathered data on a person’s FB friends
• The data was allegedly used to develop “psychographic” profiles of people and deliver pro-Trump material to them online during the 2016 US presidential elections

#DeleteFacebook gains momentum

A movement to quit Facebook has gathered momentum, getting a boost from a co-founder of WhatsApp messaging service acquired by the social network in 2014. “It is time. #deletefacebook,” Brian Acton, now with rival messaging application Signal, said in a tweet, using the hashtag protesting the handling of the crisis by the biggest social network.