These interviews are damning.
Facebook may have seriously fukked up way beyond what I thought previously
Apparently they could vacuum up profiles from people who didn’t even download the initial app they targeted towards people
@DonKnock @dza @88m3 @wire28 @smitty22 @fact @Hood Critic @ExodusNirvana @Blessed Is the Man @dtownreppin214 @JKFrazier @tmonster @BigMoneyGrip @Soymuscle Mike @.r. @Dorian Breh @Dameon Farrow @TheNig @VR Tripper @re'up @Blackfyre_Berserker @Cali_livin
:ALERTRED::ALERTRED:
Now you DEFINITELY have to watch this video:
Cambridge Analytica scrambles to halt Channel 4 exposé
Firm with links to Trump election under pressure after Facebook ban over data harvesting
7 hours ago
© AP
Cambridge Analytica, the data firm alleged to have used the personal information of millions of
Facebook users without their knowledge in its work for Donald Trump’s election campaign, is trying to stop the broadcast of an undercover Channel 4 News report in which its chief executive talks unguardedly about its practices.
Channel 4 reporters posed as prospective clients and had a series of meetings with Cambridge Analytica that they secretly filmed — including at least one with Alexander Nix, its chief executive. Channel 4 declined to comment.
Mr Nix referred the FT to Cambridge Analytica’s spokesperson when asked if he was aware of the Channel 4 report, which is due to air this week, according to people briefed on the situation. Cambridge Analytica’s spokesman declined to comment on the undercover Channel 4 report.
The company is under mounting pressure over how it
uses personal data in political and election campaign work. It was
banned by Facebook on Friday, which claimed it had violated the social network’s rules by failing to delete Facebook user data collected by an app for research purposes.
Press reports on Saturday claimed the company had harvested data from more than 50m profiles mostly belonging to US voters.
Christopher Wylie, a former Cambridge Analytica employee, showed documents to the New York Times, The Observer and Channel 4 News, which the news outlets said detailed a programme that used data from a survey without users’ permission. Some 270,000 users had granted permission for their data to be used for research purposes, not passed to a political data analytics firm, and they may have exposed data from their friends in the process.
Mr Nix recently told a parliamentary select committee that Cambridge Analytica did not use data from Facebook, including Facebook Likes, or any personality modelling.
Alexander Nix, Cambridge Analytica chief executive
Facebook said that in 2015 it discovered that Dr Aleksandr Kogan, a psychology professor at the University of Cambridge, had passed data collected by a personality prediction app that ran on Facebook to Cambridge Analytica.
The “this is your digital life” app was billed as a research app used by psychologists. Some 270,000 people downloaded the app, which used Facebook login details, and gave it consent to access data from their Facebook profiles including their city, the likes and information about their friends.
In a statement, Cambridge Analytica said it believed Dr Kogan’s company Global Science Research was complying with UK law. It also said the data it had received from GSR was not used during its work in the 2016 US presidential election.
“GSR was a company led by a seemingly reputable academic at an internationally renowned institution who made explicit contractual commitments to us regarding the its legal authority to license data to SCL Elections [Cambridge Analytica’s parent]. It would be entirely incorrect to attempt to claim that SCL Elections illegally acquired Facebook data,” the company wrote in a statement.
But a report in The Observer based on an interview with Mr Wylie, the Cambridge Analytica whistleblower, said the number of affected profiles was far larger and more than 50m. The New York Times reported that 30m profiles contained enough data to match users to other records and build psychographic profiles.
Even if Cambridge Analytica no longer holds any Facebook data, it may have used the data to build the algorithms and profiles it now sells to political campaigns around the world and businesses. The Financial Times is among the company’s former clients, having once used Cambridge Analytica for a market research project.
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