Facebook suspends data analytics firm that worked for Trump campaign

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. — Reuters picSAN FRANCISCO, March 17 — Facebook Inc yesterday 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 behaviour,” Facebook said, adding that it was continuing to investigate the claims.

Cambridge Analytica worked for the failed presidential campaign of US 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 yesterday.

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 organisation 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 organisation.

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 US$6.2 million, according to Federal Election Commission records.

Cambridge Analytica says it uses “behavioural microtargeting”, or combining analysis of people’s personalities with demographics, to predict and influence mass behaviour. It says it has data on 220 million Americans, two thirds of the US 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.

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 yesterday. — Reuters </s> OTTAWA — Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg made a public apology Wednesday for his company’s handling of users’ personal information — including more than 620,000 Canadians — as the social media giant faced a growing international uproar over the questionable use of personal data for political purposes.

The company estimates 622,161 users in Canada had their data improperly shared with Cambridge Analytica through apps used by themselves or their friends.

Overall, Facebook says that 87 million of its users worldwide were affected — significantly more than the 50 million originally believed to be affected — with nearly 82 per cent of them believed to be located in the United States.

The company said those affected will find out Monday if their information was improperly shared with Cambridge Analytica.

Zuckerberg said the privacy breach showed his company didn’t take seriously its responsibility towards users “and that was a huge mistake.”

“It was my mistake. So now we have to go through every part of our relationship with people and make sure we’re taking a broad enough view of our responsibility,” he said during an afternoon conference call with reporters.

“It’s not enough to just connect people. We have to make sure those connections are positive and that they bring people closer together.”

Canada’s privacy commissioner said he wasn’t surprised at the magnitude of the number of Canadians affected. Speaking in Toronto, Daniel Therrien said the figure will work into his ongoing investigation about the data breach and whether there were any violations of federal privacy laws.

Facebook is facing its worst privacy scandal ever in the wake of allegations that Cambridge Analytica used data collected without users’ authorization to help Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and possibly other elections. Policy makers in Canada and other countries are now wrestling with how to respond to the spread of “fake news” on social media platforms like Facebook, which announced Wednesday it had also shut down accounts and pages linked to a Russian agency accused of online meddling in foreign elections.

Zuckerberg said the company would bring to 20,000 the number of workers dedicated to battling “fake news,” as he apologized for initially dismissing the notion that the misinformation campaign had any impact on election outcomes.

The social media giant plans to restrict data access on its platforms, which includes Instagram, to better protect users’ information. Facebook will disable a feature that let anyone search Facebook for a user with their email or phone number, saying in a post that “malicious actors” had used the tool to scrape personal data of most users on Facebook. And starting Monday, it will show people which apps use their Facebook information.

Zuckerberg is set to testify next week before a U.S. congressional committee, and he said top executives at the company would be dispatched to other countries wanting to hold government hearings on the scandal.

Canada’s acting minister for democratic institutions called Facebook’s admission of the scope of the breach “deeply concerning.”

“While Facebook has begun to take initial steps to address these issues, it is clear that much more needs to be done,” Scott Brison said in a statement.

Brison has said he’d be open to strengthening federal privacy laws, which don’t currently apply to political parties. And Zuckerberg appeared open to further regulation in a sector that has so far shied away from government oversight.

International experts in the national capital Wednesday to talk about the issue of “fake news” said the Liberals needed to enact stronger privacy laws to better regulate how social media giants use Canadians’ personal information.

“Since there are insufficient limits on what you can do with personal data, there is no countervailing force,” said David Carroll, an American academic who is suing Cambridge Analytica in the U.K. to gain access to his data.

“We need to realize that privacy legislation will weaken the behemoths in a healthy way.”

Other options put forward included greater transparency for online advertising that would enable users to easily learn who paid for a Facebook ad, how much they spent, how many people viewed it and why the ad targeted the user. Ben Scott, a former adviser in the State Department, said countries should look for ways to restrict the use of personal data for political targeting to avoid the kind of dirty tricks campaigns Cambridge Analytica is accused of conducting.

Sue Gardner, former executive director of Wikimedia Foundation, said there is general opposition south of the border to government regulations in the sector, with a belief that government involvement would make matters worse. Instead, recommendations in the U.S. centre around self-regulation.

“Those are massively insufficient for the scope of the problem,” she said.

— With files from Andy Blatchford in Ottawa and Dave Paddon in Toronto </s> The scandal-ridden company has filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy, reports Reuters. The filing isn’t unexpected as the company and its British parent SCL Elections Ltd said earlier this month they would both be shutting down and filing for bankruptcy after an abrupt drop in business after news of the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal broke in March. It was then that allegations surfaced that said the Trump 2016 election campaign hired the firm to target voters on social media. The company was allegedly improperly using the data of at least 87 million Facebook users since 2014 in attempts to target voters with specific messaging for its users, who did not give their consent to have their demographic and psychometric data be used in such a way. </s> SAN FRANCISCO (CBS/AP) — Facebook suspended Cambridge Analytica, a data-analysis firm that worked for President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, over allegations that it held onto improperly obtained user data after telling Facebook it had deleted the information.

The social network issued a blog post explaining its decision, although the tale is convoluted. Years ago, Facebook said, Cambridge Analytica received user data from a Facebook app that purported to be a psychological research tool, though the firm wasn’t authorized to have that information. Roughly 270,000 people downloaded the app and shared their personal details with it, Facebook said.

Cambridge Analytica later certified in 2015 that it had destroyed the information that it received, according to Facebook, although the social network said it received reports “several days ago” that not all the data was deleted.

While it investigates the matter, Facebook has also suspended the access of Cambridge Analytica’s parent company, Strategic Communication Laboratories; the academic who created the app in question, a University of Cambridge psychology professor named Aleksandr Kogan; and another individual, Christopher Wylie of Eunoia Technologies, who also allegedly received the user data from the app.

Exactly why the handling of this data warranted both suspension and Facebook’s unusual public explanation of the move wasn’t clear. The blog post, written by Facebook deputy general counsel Paul Grewal, cited the “public prominence” of Cambridge Analytica, called the alleged data retention an “unacceptable violation of trust” and said the social network will take legal action if necessary to hold all parties “responsible and accountable for any unlawful behavior.”

In a statement, a Cambridge Analytica spokesman denied any wrongdoing. He said the parent company’s SCL Elections unit hired Kogan to undertake “a large scale research project in the U.S.,” but later learned that he had obtained data in violation of Facebook policies, and subsequently deleted all data it received from Kogan’s company. For the “avoidance of doubt,” the spokesman said, none of Kogan’s data was used in Cambridge Analytica’s 2016 election work.

Kogan did not immediately reply to an emailed request for comment. Wylie could not immediately be located.

Cambridge Analytica is probably best known for its political work in the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign. The company claims to build psychological profiles based on personal details from millions of Americans that can categorize individual voters. It worked for both the primary campaign of Texas senator Ted Cruz and the Trump general-election campaign .

The firm is backed by the family of billionaire donor Robert Mercer, a hedge fund manager who also supported the Trump campaign and other conservative candidates and causes. Trump campaign officials have downplayed Cambridge Analytica’s role, saying they briefly used the company for television advertising and paid some of its most skilled data employees.

But the company has also surfaced a few times during the probes into Russian interference in the 2016 election. For instance, Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who is now cooperating with special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation after pleading guilty to a felony charge , disclosed an advisory role with Cambridge Analytica last August. SCL later said that position never materialized.

Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix also disclosed last November that the company reached out to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange during the campaign to request emails related to the Hillary Clinton campaign. Nix said Assange said no. Clinton campaign emails stolen by Russian agents are one focus of the election-interference probes. Nix has denied any involvement in Russian election meddling.

© Copyright 2018 Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed </s> Cambridge Analytica is closing its US offices in wake of the disclosure of its misuse of Facebook data, media reported. The company has filed for insolvency in the UK and will start bankruptcy proceedings in the US soon.

"Earlier today, SCL Elections Ltd., as well as certain of its and Cambridge Analytica LLC's UK affiliates (collectively, the "company" or "Cambridge Analytica") filed applications to commence insolvency proceedings in the UK," the company announced in a statement.

The statement said that "parallel bankruptcy proceedings will soon be commenced on behalf of Cambridge Analytica LLC and the certain of the company's US affiliates in the United States Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York."

All employees have been instructed to promptly turn in their computers and return their keycards, with the firm announcing that it will officially close its doors on Wednesday, the report said.

Facebook has acknowledged that Cambridge Analytica harvested the personal information of up to 87 million users of the social media site without the permission from the users.

READ MORE: UK Parl't Invites Zuckerberg to Give Evidence on Cambridge Analytica Case — MP

Cambridge Analytica is a private UK-based analytical company that uses in-depth data analysis technology to develop strategic communication during election campaigns on the Internet. The company has worked on various political campaigns, using the data to improve a mechanism that would predict and influence the behavior of voters. </s> Facebook has banned Cambridge Analytica, a data analytics firm that played a key role in multiple populist political campaigns, including Brexit and the presidential campaign of Donald Trump.

Facebook announced that it would ban the account of Cambridge Analytica’s parent company, Strategic Communication Laboratories, in addition to the accounts of Aleksandr Kogan, a psychologist at the University of Cambridge, and Christopher Wylie, an employee of Eunoia Technologies.

In their post explaining the ban, Facebook said that Kogan passed user data obtained via Facebook to Cambridge Analytica and to Wylie, and that both Wylie and Cambridge Analytica failed to delete this data.

Facebook conceded that Kogan “gained access to this information in a legitimate way and through the proper channels that governed all developers on Facebook at that time,” but said by passing the data to third parties “he did not subsequently abide by our rules.”

In 2015, when Facebook learned that Kogan had shared the results of his research on Facebook users with Cambridge Analytica and Wylie, they asked them to delete the data, and received assurances from both that this had been done.

Facebook said that their decision to ban Cambridge Analytica’s parent company was made on the basis of reports that they are currently investigating.

Several days ago, we received reports that, contrary to the certifications we were given, not all data was deleted. We are moving aggressively to determine the accuracy of these claims. If true, this is another unacceptable violation of trust and the commitments they made.

Cambridge Analytica has been at the heart of several high-profile campaigns on the political right. The company initially attracted Ted Cruz as a client during the Republican primaries in 2015-16, and went on to work for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. Another client of Cambridge Analytica was Leave.Eu, the successful campaign for British withdrawal from the European Union.

Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News. You can follow him on Twitter, Gab.ai and add him on Facebook. Email tips and suggestions to allumbokhari@protonmail.com. </s> New York — British political consulting group Cambridge Analytica filed for voluntary Chapter 7 bankruptcy in the Southern District of New York, court documents showed.

The firm, whose attorney filed late on Wednesday, announced in early May that it would close and file for bankruptcy in the UK and the US after failing to recover from the Facebook data scandal.

The documents listed Cambridge Analytica’s estimated assets in the range of $100,001 and $500,000, with estimated liabilities between $1m and $10m. Earlier in May, the company, which worked on Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, claimed its business had been ruined by "numerous unfounded accusations", which rendered operating the business "no longer viable".

The firm became embroiled in scandal in March when former analyst Christopher Wylie revealed it had used a Facebook personality prediction app to hijack up to 87-million Facebook users’ data — claims Cambridge Analytica denies.

Soon after, Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix was suspended after he was filmed by undercover reporters bragging about ways to win political campaigns, including through blackmail and honey traps.

Meanwhile, another whistle-blower said Britons’ personal data may have been misused by a pro-Brexit campaign ahead of the 2016 referendum in which Britain voted to leave the EU.

Wylie has also since told a Senate panel on interference in the 2016 US election that Cambridge Analytica had used Russian researchers and shared data with companies linked to Russian intelligence.

This week, the New York Times reported the US justice department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation are investigating Cambridge Analytica — although it was unclear if the probe was linked to special counsel Robert Mueller’s into Trump campaign collusion with Russia. </s> A German court on Monday temporarily suspended a February decision by the cartel office to order Facebook to restrict its data collection practices in Germany.

BERLIN: A German court on Monday temporarily suspended a February decision by the cartel office to order Facebook to restrict its data collection practices in Germany.

"The suspension of the order means that Facebook does not have to implement the decision of the Federal Cartel Office for the time being," the Higher Regional Court in Duesseldorf said in its ruling.

Facebook appealed the landmark decision by the cartel office that the world's largest social network abused its market dominance to gather information about users without their consent. It ordered Facebook to curb its data collection practices.

Facebook declined to comment on the court decision. The cartel office said it would issue a statement on the decision later on Monday.

The court said its temporary injunction removing restrictions on Facebook's data gathering would be valid until it had made a final decision on the company's appeal.

Germany, where privacy concerns run deep, is at the forefront of a global backlash against Facebook, fueled by last year's Cambridge Analytica scandal in which tens of millions of Facebook profiles were harvested without their users' consent.

In its February decision, the antitrust watchdog objected in particular to how Facebook pools data on people from third-party apps - including its own WhatsApp and Instagram - and its online tracking of people who aren't even members through Facebook 'like' or 'share' buttons.

Last month, Facebook said it will improve safeguards on user data as part of a settlement to resolve a U.S. government probe into its privacy practices, which resulted in a US$5 billion fine. </s> Facebook Suspends Political Data Firm Used In Trump Campaign

Facebook has suspended the data analytics firm that the Trump campaign relied on during the 2016 election, saying the firm improperly received user data and then may have failed to get rid of it.

On Friday, the social media giant announced that Cambridge Analytica; parent company Strategic Communication Laboratories; Christopher Wylie, who helped found Cambridge Analytica; and U.K.-based professor Aleksandr Kogan were all barred from Facebook pending an investigation.

Kogan of the University of Cambridge came up with an app billed on Facebook as a personality predictor "used by psychologists." About 270,000 people downloaded "thisisyourdigitallife," according to Facebook, and in doing so gave away their data; some — depending on security settings — even gave away information about their Facebook friends.

Although users may not have realized it, the mining of their personal information was aboveboard; just by downloading the app they had — knowingly or not — consented to giving it away.

But they did not consent to Kogan giving it away, Facebook says. And when Kogan passed on their data to Cambridge Analytica, he violated platform policies against sharing information with a third party.

Facebook says it learned about what happened in 2015 and removed the app, then demanded Kogan, Cambridge Analytica and SCL destroy the data. Facebook says it was assured by each entity the data was gone.

Now Facebook says it recently learned those assurances may have been false.

"Several days ago, we received reports that, contrary to the certifications we were given, not all data was deleted," Facebook Vice President and Deputy General Counsel Paul Grewal said in a statement Friday. "We are moving aggressively to determine the accuracy of these claims."

In its own statement, it concedes it contracted with and received data from Global Science Research, a company led by Kogan, but says that when it learned that the user information was not obtained in line with Facebook's terms of service, it deleted all of it.

Cambridge Analytica says it is committed to receiving information in accordance with the UK Data Protection Act "and to seek the informed consent of each respondent."

To what extent the Trump campaign and Cambridge Analytica were intertwined remains murky.

Billionaire Republican donor Robert Mercer, who donated to the Trump campaign, backs Cambridge Analytica, having invested millions of dollars in the company. And Trump's former chief strategist Steve Bannon sat on its board, even naming the company, according The New York Times.

According to the newspaper, "the firm was effectively a shell" based in the U.K. and run by foreigners whose contracts with American campaigns — including that of presidential hopeful Ted Cruz — possibly violated Federal Election Commission rules. (The Times interviewed Wylie, who has since left the company and runs another firm.)

The Trump campaign says it briefly used Cambridge Analytica for TV ads and paid some of its data employees, according to The Associated Press.

But congressional investigators have questioned CEO Alexander Nix about the company's role in the campaign.

Nix said last fall that the firm reached out to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in the runup to the election to request emails connected to the Hillary Clinton campaign. WikiLeaks said no. It was around the same time that Cambridge began working for the Trump campaign, reports The Wall Street Journal.

The Journal also reports that the firm has become ensnared in Justice Department special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

The company says it uses data analytics and behavioral psychology to boost the clients' campaigns. Nix has denied to the U.K. Parliament that the company gets its data from Facebook.

And yet as the firm sought to build "psychographic profiles" to help discern whom Internet users are and how political messaging might be tailored to them, it turned to Kogan, the Cambridge University psychology professor. The Times says Kogan created the app using a technique developed at the school's Psychometrics Centre, which is designed to map personality traits based Facebook likes. Kogan then put the app on Facebook under the false pretense of using it for academic purposes.

All told, the Times says Kogan handed over more than 50 million profiles to Cambridge Analytica, including information from app users' friends — who had never consented to forgoing their data. Around 30 million of those profiles contained enough information to build psychographic profiles, the newspaper says.

The firm said in its 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 says it will take legal action if it finds something unlawful occurred.
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