Researcher in Facebook scandal says: my work was worthless to Cambridge Analytica
Researcher in Facebook scandal says: my work was
worthless to Cambridge Analytica
By Alistair Smout, Douglas Busvine APRIL 24, 2018 / 4:02
AM / UPDATED
LONDON (Reuters) - A researcher at the center of a
scandal over the alleged misuse of the data of nearly 100 million Facebook users
said on Tuesday the work he did was useless for the sort of targeted adverts
that would be needed to sway an election.
Aleksandr Kogan, who worked for the University of
Cambridge, is at the center of a controversy over Cambridge Analytica’s use of
millions of users’ data without their permission after it was hired by Donald
Trump for his 2016 election campaign.
Kogan said it was unlikely Cambridge Analytica had used
the data in the Trump campaign, although he also said that its suspended CEO
Alexander Nix had lied to a committee of British lawmakers about how the two
worked together.
Kogan said that even if the dataset he compiled was used
in a political campaign, it would be little use for targeted advertising.
“Quite frankly, if the goal is micro-targeting using
Facebook ads, (the project) makes no sense. It’s not what you would do,” he
told a parliamentary committee, adding that Facebook itself had better tools
for such adverts and that the work was worth “literally nothing”.
“If the use case you have is Facebook ads, it’s just
incompetent to do it this way.”
Facebook has said that the personal information of about
87 million users may have been improperly shared with political consultancy
Cambridge Analytica, after Kogan created a personality quiz app to collect the
data.
Facebook and Cambridge Analytica have blamed Kogan for
alleged data misuse, but he has said that he was being made a scapegoat by the
companies for the scandal.
Kogan said that former Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander
Nix, who was also a director of the consultancy’s parent firm SCL Group, had
previously lied to lawmakers when he said he had not received data from Kogan.
“We certainly gave them data, that’s indisputable,” Kogan
told lawmakers. Asked if Nix had lied, Kogan answered: “Absolutely.” A
spokesman for Cambridge Analytica declined to comment on Nix’s testimony,
noting that he was suspended pending an investigation.
Kogan said Facebook provided him data in an email, and he
had not needed to sign an agreement to use it. However, he said that he did not
sell the data provided to him by Facebook.
Instead, Kogan said he collected new data through an app
for work with SCL, Cambridge Analytica’s parent company.
He hired a market research firm called Qualtrics to
recruit 200,000 to 300,000 people to take the quiz to collect the data,
resulting in expenses of $600,000-$800,000. Kogan’s company was paid 230,000
pounds ($320,643.00) by SCL for its predictive analysis based on the findings,
Kogan said.
In written evidence to parliament, Kogan said that all of
his academic work was reviewed and approved by the University’s ethics
committees.
However, a letter from 2015, published by the Guardian,
shows that the ethics committee rejected one of Kogan’s projects in 2015 and
said that Facebook’s privacy project was “not sufficient protection” to address
concerns.
Kogan said that the data he collected had now all been
deleted, to the best of his knowledge, but he would double check that none
remained. Cambridge Analytica also said that it had deleted the data when asked
to by Facebook.
“We’re extremely sorry that we ended up in possession of
data that clearly had breached Facebook’s terms of service,” spokesman Clarence
Mitchell told reporters.
“That’s something that we wouldn’t have wanted to happen.
But we have put in place the procedures to begin to rectify it.”
Mitchell also said that the data was not used in the
Trump campaign after it had been demonstrated to be ineffective.
“Any suggestion that the GSR Kogan data was used in that
campaign is utterly incorrect. Its effective uselessness had already been
identified by then,” he said.
Kogan said that he never drew a salary from GSR, the
company that he founded to do the research that was wound up last year. Most of
the money received from SCL was spent on coding work, acquiring data and legal
fees. He was allowed to keep the data he gathered on the project.
Kogan said that GSR had a close relationship with
Facebook, and one of his partners at the firm, Joseph Chancellor, now worked
for the social media giant.
“This has been a very painful experience, because when I
entered into all of this, Facebook was a close ally,” Kogan said.
“I was thinking this would be helpful to my academic
career and my relationship with Facebook. It has very clearly done the complete
opposite”
($1 = 0.7173 pounds)
Reporting by Alistair Smout and Douglas Busvine; Editing
by Guy Faulconbridge and Matthew Mpoke Bigg
Comments
Post a Comment