Facebook
said it was suspending political data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica, which
worked for President Donald Trump’s 2016 election campaign, after finding data
privacy policies had been violated.
Facebook said in a statement that it suspended Cambridge
Analytica and its parent group Strategic Communication Laboratories (SCL) after
receiving reports that they did not delete information about Facebook users
that had been inappropriately shared.
Cambridge Analytica was not immediately available for comment.
Facebook did not mention the Trump campaign or any political campaigns in its
statement, attributed to company Deputy General Counsel Paul Grewal.
“We will take legal action if necessary to hold them responsible
and accountable for any unlawful behavior,” Facebook said, adding that it was
continuing to investigate the claims.
Cruz, Trump campaigns
Cambridge Analytica worked for the failed presidential campaign
of U.S. Senator Ted Cruz and then for the presidential campaign of Donald
Trump. On its website, it says it “provided the Donald J. Trump for President
campaign with the expertise and insights that helped win the White House.”
Brad Parscale, who ran Trump’s digital ad operation in 2016 and
is his 2020 campaign manager, declined to comment Friday.
In past interviews with Reuters, Parscale has said that
Cambridge Analytica played a minor role as a contractor in the 2016 Trump
campaign, and that the campaign used voter data from a Republican-affiliated
organization rather than Cambridge Analytica.
Facebook’s Grewal said the company was taking the unusual step
of announcing the suspension “given the public prominence” of Cambridge
Analytica and its parent organization.
No ads, administering pages
The suspension means Cambridge Analytica and SCL cannot buy ads
on the world’s largest social media network or administer pages belonging to
clients, Andrew Bosworth, a Facebook vice president, said in a Twitter post.
Trump’s campaign hired Cambridge Analytica in June 2016 and paid
it more than $6.2 million, according to Federal Election Commission records.
Cambridge Analytica says it uses “behavioral microtargeting,” or
combining analysis of people’s personalities with demographics, to predict and
influence mass behavior. It says it has data on 220 million Americans,
two-thirds of the U.S. population.
It has worked on other campaigns in the United States and other
countries, and it is funded by Robert Mercer, a prominent supporter of
politically conservative groups. Facebook in its statement described a rocky
relationship with Cambridge Analytica and two individuals going back to 2015.
Professor's app
That year, Facebook said, it learned that University of
Cambridge professor Aleksandr Kogan lied to the company and violated its
policies by sharing data that he acquired with a so-called “research app” that
used Facebook’s login system.
Kogan was not immediately available for comment.
The app was downloaded by about 270,000 people. Facebook said
that Kogan gained access to profile and other information “in a legitimate way”
but “he did not subsequently abide by our rules” when he passed the data to
SCL/Cambridge Analytica and Christopher Wylie of Eunoia Technologies.
Eunoia did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Facebook said it cut ties to Kogan’s app when it learned of the
violation in 2015, and asked for certification from Kogan and all parties he
had given data to that the information had been destroyed.
Although all certified that
they had destroyed the data, Facebook said that it received reports in the past
several days that “not all data was deleted,” prompting the suspension
announced Friday.
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