Facebook and the analytics company
that worked with Donald Trump’s election team have come under mounting
pressure, with calls for investigations and hearings to explain a vast
data breach that affected tens of millions of people.
In Britain, the head of the parliamentary committee investigating
fake news accused Cambridge Analytica and Facebook of misleading MPs
after revelations in the Observer that more than 50m Facebook profiles were harvested and used to build a system that may have influenced voters in the 2016 presidential campaign.
The Conservative MP Damian Collins said he would call the heads of both companies, Alexander Nix and Mark Zuckerberg, to give further testimony.
His intervention came after a whistleblower spoke to the Observer
and described how the profiles, mostly of US voters, were harvested for
Cambridge Analytica, in one of Facebook’s biggest ever data breaches.
The disclosures caused outrage on both sides of the Atlantic; in the
US, a state attorney general has called for investigations and greater accountability and regulation.
There have been reports that Cambridge Analytica
is trying to stop the broadcast of a Channel 4 News exposé in which Nix
is said to talk unguardedly about the company’s practices. According to
the Financial Times, reporters posed as prospective clients and
secretly filmed a series of meetings, including one with the chief
executive. The report is due to air this week.
Collins, the chair of the Commons digital, culture, media and sport
select committee, said he would be recalling Nix to give further
testimony to explain why he had told MPs last month that his company had
not received data from Facebook.
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“We will be contacting Alexander Nix next week asking him to explain his comments,” he said.
Collins will also call on Zuckerberg to testify. He said the company
appeared to have previously sent executives who were able to avoid
difficult questions and who “claimed not to know the answers”.
The two men may also face a summons from US lawmakers. Adam Schiff,
the top Democrat on the House intelligence committee, called for
Cambridge Analytica to be “thoroughly investigated” and said Facebook must answer questions about how it came to provide private user information to an academic with links to Russia.
The Republican majority on the House intelligence committee announced
this week they were winding up their investigation into Russia’s
election interference, concluding there was no collusion with Trump’s
campaign and, even more controversially, that Moscow did not seek to
assist him. Schiff fiercely condemned that decision and said the
Democratic minority would continue working on prescriptions for
protecting the country in the future.
“This raises serious questions about the level of detail that Cambridge Analytica
knew about users, whether it acquired that information illegally and
whether it sought to abuse that information in support of President
Trump’s political campaign in the United States or Brexit in the United
Kingdom,” he told the Guardian.
“The company has repeatedly touted its ability to influence voters
through ‘psychographic’ targeting and has claimed it was the fundamental
reason that Donald Trump
won the 2016 election. Indeed, it may be that through Cambridge
Analytica, the Trump campaign made use of illegitimately acquired data
on millions of Americans in order to help sway the election.”
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Trump’s
campaign hired Cambridge Analytica in June 2016 and paid it more than
$6.2m, according to Federal Election Commission records. It denies using
any Facebook data in the campaign.
Shortly before the story broke, Facebook’s external lawyers warned
the Observer that it was making “false and defamatory” allegations and
reserved Facebook’s legal position. Facebook denies that the harvesting
of tens of millions of profiles by Cambridge Analytica, working with
Cambridge academic Aleksandr Kogan and his company Global Science
Research (GSR), was a data breach.
It also suspended
the whistleblower Chris Wylie from the platform “pending further
information” over misuse of data, along with his former employer
Cambridge Analytica and its affiliates, and the academic they worked
with, Kogan.
The public attack on Wylie came after he had approached the tech
company about the data breach, offering to help investigate. He
described it as a chilling attack on someone acting in the public
interest.
“They acknowledged my offer but then turned around and shot the
messenger. I’m trying to make amends for my mistakes and so should
Facebook,” he told the Guardian. “Facebook has known about this for at
least two years and did almost nothing to fix it. This is not new. And
it’s only by coming forward that Facebook is now taking action. People
need to know this kind of profiling is happening.”
Collins said his committee wanted more information from Facebook
about the circumstances around the breach. “Data has been taken from
Facebook users without their consent, and was then processed by a third
party and used to support their campaigns. Facebook knew about this, and
the involvement of Cambridge Analytica with it.”
“We need to hear from people who can speak about Facebook from a
position of authority that requires them to know the truth,” Collins
said. “Someone has to take responsibility for this. It’s time for Mark
Zuckerberg to stop hiding behind his Facebook page.”
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Last
month, both Facebook representatives and Nix told the parliamentary
inquiry into fake news that the company did not have or use private
Facebook data, or any data from GSR.
But in its statement on Friday night, explaining why it had suspended
Cambridge Analytica and Wylie, Facebook said it had known in 2015 that
profiles were passed to Nix’s company.
“In 2015, we learned that a psychology professor at the University of
Cambridge named Dr Aleksandr Kogan lied to us and violated our ‘platform policies’ by passing data from an app that was using Facebook Login to SCL/Cambridge Analytica,” the statement said.
Collins attacked Facebook for appearing to have been “deliberately
avoiding answering straight questions” in testimony to the committee.
“It is now clear that data has been taken from Facebook users without
their consent, and was then processed by a third party and used to
support their campaigns,” Collins said. “Facebook knew about this, and
the involvement of Cambridge Analytica with it.”
Cambridge Analytica responded to the Observer story
on Twitter before Collins had said Nix would be recalled. “We refute(s)
these mischaracterizations and false allegations,” it said.
“Reality Check: Cambridge Analytica uses client and commercially and
publicly available data; we don’t use or hold any Facebook data,” the
company said. “When we learned GSR sold us Facebook data that it
shouldn’t have done, we deleted it all – system wide audit to verify.”
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