Facebook confirms Cambridge Analytica stole its data; its a plot, claims former director

[FarCenter]

Analysis Facebook has “suspended” any business with controversial analytics firm Cambridge Analytica (CA) and its holding company, following claims by CA’s former director that the social media ad slinger’s data was purloined and used for political dirty tricks.

In a statement Facebook said that in April 2015 Dr Aleksandr Kogan, a lecturer at Cambridge University's Department of Psychology, published an app on its site called thisisyourdigitallife, and said it was "a research app used by psychologists." But instead of just using it for research, Facebook claims it was used for commercial purposes by Cambridge Analytica and others.

“Approximately 270,000 people downloaded the app. In so doing, they gave their consent for Kogan to access information such as the city they set on their profile, or content they had liked, as well as more limited information about friends who had their privacy settings set to allow it,” the statement reads.

The kicker’s in the last bit of that. Unless users had their Facebook privacy settings locked down the app slurped not only the 270,000 consenting users but all their friends as well - over 50 million people according to Christopher Wylie, a former researcher director at CA, who had a copy of the data set.

Facebook is peeved that the data was collected under an academic license and then sold commercially. Dr Kogan has no comment at time of publication, but CA has said it was misled about the data’s legality under British law when it worked with Kogan’s company Global Science Research (GSR) in 2014.

“When it subsequently became clear that the data had not been obtained by GSR in line with Facebook’s terms of service, Cambridge Analytica deleted all data received from GSR,” CA said in a statement.

“No data from GSR was used by Cambridge Analytica as part of the services it provided to the Donald Trump 2016 presidential campaign.”

Facebook knew about the incident in 2015 and sought assurances from all concerned that the data had been deleted. What has prompted Friday’s suspension of Cambridge Analytica was Wylie going public to various media outlets with some extraordinary claims about how the data was used.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/03/18/facebook_confirms_cambridge_analytica_stole_its_data_its_a_plot_claims_former_director/

[Botany]

1. Anybody want to get that barn door now?

<Analysis Facebook has “suspended” any business with controversial analytics
firm Cambridge Analytica .... >

[FarCenter]

3. It was "closed" back in 2016

Wylie claims to have deleted the data before being formally asked to do so by Facebook in 2016, a year after the misuse was discovered by the social media firm. All he had to do was fill in a form saying he had deleted and Facebook were satisfied with that.

The problem with lawyers and accountants is that they believe that stuff written on paper represents reality.

[C_U_L8R]

2. Not so fast there

Between Peter Thiel and all your Russian investors, this looks all too convenient. Conspiracy will need to be proven out so lets just say you all had a mutual interest. A big mutual interest.

[FarCenter]

4. Its not a data breach - its a feature

On Saturday morning Facebook updated its statement on the matter with the following missive:

The claim that this is a data breach is completely false. Aleksandr Kogan requested and gained access to information from users who chose to sign up to his app, and everyone involved gave their consent. People knowingly provided their information, no systems were infiltrated, and no passwords or sensitive pieces of information were stolen or hacked.

On social media the company's head of security Alex Stamos has been taking to Twitter to make the same point. He pointed out that users now have controls in their privacy settings to block just this kind of data slurping. However, he has now deleted those tweets.