{"id":60760,"date":"2018-03-17T05:47:57","date_gmt":"2018-03-17T05:47:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.biphoo.com\/bipnews\/?p=60760"},"modified":"2018-03-17T05:47:57","modified_gmt":"2018-03-17T05:47:57","slug":"facebook-suspends-cambridge-analytica-data-analysis-firm-worked-trump-campaign","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.biphoo.com\/bipnews\/news\/facebook-suspends-cambridge-analytica-data-analysis-firm-worked-trump-campaign.html","title":{"rendered":"Facebook suspends Cambridge Analytica, the data analysis firm that worked on the Trump campaign"},"content":{"rendered":"

Facebook suspends Cambridge Analytica, the data analysis firm that worked on the Trump campaign<\/span><\/strong><\/h2>\n

Facebook announced late Friday that it had suspended the account of Strategic Communication Laboratories, and its political data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica \u2014 which used Facebook data to target voters for President Donald Trump\u2019s campaign in the 2016 election. In a statement released by Paul Grewal, the company\u2019s vice president and deputy general counsel, Facebook explained that the suspension was the result of a violation of its platform policies. The company noted that the very unusual step of a public blog post explaining the decision to act against Cambridge Analytica was due to \u201cthe public prominence of this organization.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Facebook claims that back in 2015 Cambridge Analytica obtained Facebook user information without approval from the social network through work the company did with a University of Cambridge psychology professor named Dr. Aleksandr Kogan. Kogan developed an app called \u201cthisisyourdigitallife\u201d that purported to offer a personality prediction in the form of \u201ca research app used by psychologists.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Apparently around 270,000 people downloaded the app, which used Facebook Login and granted Kogan access to users\u2019 geographic information, content they had liked, and limited information about users\u2019 friends. While Kogan\u2019s method of obtaining personal information aligned with Facebook\u2019s policies, \u201che did not subsequently abide by our rules,\u201d Grewal stated in the Facebook post.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cBy passing information on to a third party, including SCL\/Cambridge Analytica and Christopher Wylie of Eunoia Technologies, he violated our platform policies. When we learned of this violation in 2015, we removed his app from Facebook and demanded certifications from Kogan and all parties he had given data to that the information had been destroyed. Cambridge Analytica, Kogan and Wylie all certified to us that they destroyed the data.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Facebook said it first identified the violation in 2015 and took action \u2014 apparently without informing users of the violation. The company demanded that Kogan, Cambridge Analytica and Wylie certify that they had destroyed the information.<\/span><\/p>\n

Over the past few days, Facebook said it received reports (from sources it would not identify) that not all of the data Cambridge Analytica, Kogan, and Wylie collected had been deleted. While Facebook investigates the matter further, the company said it had taken the step to suspend the Cambridge Analytica account as well as the accounts of Kogan and Wylie.<\/span><\/p>\n

Depending on who you ask, UK-based Cambridge Analytica either played a pivotal role in the U.S. presidential election or cooked up an effective marketing myth to spin into future business. Last year, a handful of former Trump aides and Republican consultants dismissed the potency of Cambridge Analytica\u2019s so-called secret sauce as \u201cexaggerated\u201d in a profile by the New York Times. A May 2017 profile in the Guardian that painted the Robert Mercer-funded data company as shadowy and all-powerful resulted in legal action on behalf of Cambridge Analytica. Last October, the Daily Beast reported that Cambridge Analytica\u2019s chief executive Alexander Nix contacted Wikileaks\u2019 Julian Assange with an offer to help disseminate Hillary Clinton\u2019s controversial missing emails.<\/span><\/p>\n

In an interview with TechCrunch late last year, Nix said that his company had detailed hundreds of thousands of profiles of Americans throughout 2014 and 2015 (the time when the company was working with Sen. Ted Cruz on his presidential campaign).<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2026We used psychographics all through the 2014 midterms. We used psychographics all through the Cruz and Carson primaries. But when we got to Trump\u2019s campaign in June 2016, whenever it was, there it was there was five and a half months till the elections. We just didn\u2019t have the time to rollout that survey. I mean, Christ, we had to build all the IT, all the infrastructure. There was nothing. There was 30 people on his campaign. Thirty. Even Walker it had 160 (it\u2019s probably why he went bust). And he was the first to crash out. So as I\u2019ve said to other of your [journalist] colleagues, clearly there\u2019s psychographic data that\u2019s baked-in to legacy models that we built before, because we\u2019re not reinventing the wheel. [We\u2019ve been] using models that are based on models, that are based on models, and we\u2019ve been building these models for nearly four years. And all of those models had psychographics in them. But did we go out and rollout a long form quantitive psychographics survey specifically for Trump supporters? No. We just didn\u2019t have time. We just couldn\u2019t do that.<\/span><\/p>\n

The key implication here is that data leveraged in the Trump campaign could have originated with Kogan before being shared to Cambridge Analytica in violation of Facebook policy. The other implication is that Cambridge Analytica may not have destroyed that data back in 2015.<\/span><\/p>\n

The tools that Cambridge Analytica deployed have been at the heart of recent criticism of Facebook\u2019s approach to handling advertising and promoted posts on the social media platform.<\/span><\/p>\n

Nix credits the fact that advertising was ahead of most political messaging and that traditional political operatives hadn\u2019t figured out that the tools used for creating ad campaigns could be so effective in the political arena.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s no question that the marketing and advertising world is ahead of the political marketing the political communications world,\u201d Nix told TechCrunch last year. \u201c\u2026There are some things which [are] best practice digital advertising, best practice communications which we\u2019re taking from the commercial world and are bringing into politics.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Source:-https:\/\/techcrunch.com\/2018\/03\/16\/facebook-suspends-cambridge-analytica-the-data-analysis-firm-that-worked-for-the-trump-campaign\/<\/span><\/p>\n

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