Facebook leak: Report claims, Twitter also sold data to Cambridge Analytica researcher.
London, After Facebook, another major social media outlet Twitter has also been caught in the Cambridge Data Leak dispute. In fact, the British political consulting firm CA had used data from about 8.7 million Facebook users without their permission and information, which had a lot of controversy. Now a report claims that Twitter also sold data to a CA researcher.
According to the Sunday Telegraph report, Alexander Kogan had made tools for CA, which could make it easier for political consultancy to target profiles and voters. Importantly, much before the full scandal of the data leak was revealed, Kogan had bought data from the microblogging website in 2015.
Kogan founded Global Science Research (GSR), which allowed access to Twitter data. It has been said by the Aamamik that the information was used only in making brand reports and survey extender tools and thus there was no violation of Twitter’s policies.
Data purchased in these 5 months
Kogan purchased tweets, user names, photos, profile pictures and location data from Twitter between December 2014 and April 2015 via their GSR. Let’s tell you that in the beginning of this month, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg had confessed a big mistake on his behalf. Indeed, personal data of 8.7 million users was improperly shared with Cambridge Analytica.
Zuckerberg (33) had said that he accepts data leak charges, which caused the users, advertisers and MPs to become angry. However he also said that he is still the right person to lead the company.
According to the report, however most of the tweets are public, but Twitter companies and organizations charge large scale to collect them. Large-scale data are typically used to understand the patterns of public opinion or to know certain issues and ideas. It has also been said in the report that Twitter also bans companies for collecting sensitive political information and using this data to match the personal information obtained from elsewhere.
A Twitter spokesman has said that we have taken policy decisions on all accounts operated by Cambridge Analtiyca. Although CA may remain an organic user on our platform. Meanwhile, a CA spokesman said that the company used Twitter for political advertising but he insisted that we did not work on Twitter projects with GSR on any project and CA never received Twitter data from GSR.
Kogan had told the parliamentary committee last week that his company GSR was established in 2014 purely for creating a dataset for SCL (CA’s parent group). GSR had developed a Facebook app that allegedly collected data from people who signed up on the app. Apart from this, information of their Facebook Friends was also collected and no permission was made for this.
