New York professor sues Cambridge Analytica to find out what it knows about him
New York professor sues Cambridge Analytica to find out
what it knows about him
Facebook suspends data firm with Trump ties
By Donie O'Sullivan Updated 12:09 AM ET, Sun March 18,
2018
(CNN) A New York professor filed a legal claim against a
data company that worked for President Donald Trump's campaign in a British
court Friday in a case that could shed light on how millions of American voters
were targeted online in the run-up to the 2016 election.
The claim against Cambridge Analytica came the same day
that Facebook suspended the company from its platform as the social media site
investigates the company's use of data on Americans.
Last year, David Carroll, a professor at the New School's
Parsons School of Design, used a British data protection law to ask Cambridge
Analytica's branch in the United Kingdom to provide the data it had gathered on
him.
Cambridge's file on Carroll included predictions on the
importance of various issues to him. On a scale of one to 10, they ranked
Carroll's views on issues including gun rights, education, health care, and
"traditional social and moral values."
However, Carroll alleges that the data firm did not fully
disclose how it arrived at their predictions.
"If you just go by the topics, they are ranked in a
way that demographics alone can't explain," Carroll told CNN. "Just
by using my age and gender and zip code, they can't get such an accurate list.
There has to be more."
Cambridge Analytica did not respond to a request for
comment about Carroll's case. The firm was quoted in Mother Jones in December
saying Carroll's claims "are unfounded, and unfortunately, he is wasting
other people's money with this spurious legal action. Cambridge Analytica
abides by all relevant data protection laws and, just as importantly, the
company's core values of integrity, respect and honesty. Data privacy is a
fundamental right and one that Cambridge Analytica takes very seriously."
On Friday, Carroll's lawyers said they submitted a
request to a British court to order Cambridge Analytica and its parent company,
Strategic Communication Laboratories, to hand over all the data they have on
the professor and the source of that data.
In his written statement to court, Caroll said, "In
particular, I am concerned that I may have been targeted with messages that
criticized Secretary Hillary Clinton with falsified or exaggerated information
that negatively affected my sentiment about her candidacy and consequently
discouraged me from engaging with the Clinton campaign as a formal or informal
volunteer."
Carroll's lawyer, Ravi Naik, said in a statement Friday,
"Our client has every confidence that the court will order disclosure so
that he and the American electorate can begin to understand how their data was
used in the 2016 election. The recent wider revelations about Cambridge
Analytica/SCL show how crucial it is for our client to have a full
understanding of what these companies were doing."
Under British law, individuals can submit what are known
as "subject access" requests to organizations that hold information
about them. In most cases the organizations need to respond within 40 days with
a copy of the data, the source of the data, and if the organization will be
giving the data to others.
"It was pretty experimental at the beginning,"
Carroll said, " I was studying the practice of ad targeting from the
primaries and through the campaign because it was interesting to me from an
academic perspective."
Carroll said when he realized Cambridge Analytica had a
British branch, he decided to file a subject access request in January 2017,
not knowing if the company would be obliged to respond given that he isn't a
British citizen.
A few weeks later, however, the company responded
providing Carroll with a spreadsheet of information it had about him.
Carroll, a registered Democrat, said that the company had
accurately predicted his views on some issues and less so on others. Cambridge
scored Carroll a nine out of 10 on what it called a "traditional social
and moral values importance rank." Caroll said he wants to know what that
ranking means and what it is based on.
Cambridge Analytica's file on David Carroll included
predictions on how Carroll felt about various issues
Appearing before a British parliamentary committee
earlier this month, Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix was asked if his
company would provide American citizens, like David Carroll, all the data it
holds on them and tell them where the data came from.
Nix said that there was no legislation in the US that
provided for individuals to make such a request.
However, a week later at the same committee, the United
Kingdom's data commissioner said Americans could request information from
companies that processed their data in the UK.
On Friday, Facebook announced it was suspending Cambridge
Analytica and parent Strategic Communication Laboratories from Facebook. The
move came ahead of reports published by The New York Times and British
newspaper The Observer that called into question how the companies had handled
Facebook data.
In a statement, a spokesperson for Cambridge Analytica
denied that the organization is in violation of Facebook's terms and said it is
in communication with the social media site following the news it had been
suspended from the platform.
The company added that no data that was obtained through
a company called Global Science Research, which mined Facebook data, was used
as part of the services Cambridge Analytica provided to the Trump 2016
presidential campaign.
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