Facebook suspends Cambridge Analytica & SCL Group accounts
Facebook has announced that it suspended Cambridge Analytics and Strategic Communication Laboratories (SCL) Group from its platform for fraudulently obtaining Facebook user data and then using it to run election ads on US president Donald Trump’s behalf.
Facebook justified its move as a step towards the protection of user information as SCL/ Cambridge Analytica further violated Facebook’s policies.
It has further introduced a process whereby all apps requesting detailed user information will go through Facebook’s App Review process, which requires developers to justify the data they’re looking to collect and how they’re going to use it – before they’re allowed to even ask people for it.
In a post, Facebook’s vice president and deputy general counsel Paul Grewal explained how a psychology professor at the University of Cambridge named Dr. Aleksandr Kogan violated Facebook’s platform policies by passing data from an app that was using Facebook Login to SCL/Cambridge Analytica, a firm that does political, government and military work around the globe. He also passed that data to Christopher Wylie of Eunoia Technologies.
Grewal wrote: “Like all app developers, Kogan requested and gained access to information from people after they chose to download his app. His app, “thisisyourdigitallife,” offered a personality prediction, and billed itself on Facebook as “a research app used by psychologists.” Approximately 270,000 people downloaded the app. In so doing, they gave their consent for Kogan to access information such as the city they set on their profile, or content they had liked, as well as more limited information about friends who had their privacy settings set to allow it.
“Although Kogan gained access to this information in a legitimate way and through the proper channels that governed all developers on Facebook at that time, he did not subsequently abide by our rules. By 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”.
Source: Marketing