Cambridge Analytica – Part 2
As Mark Zuckerberg was testifying before Congress today, let’s look at the individual and company that took the personal data from Facebook.
According to The Register Aleksandr Kogan, PhD is a Russian-American psychologist who is a lecturer at Cambridge University and an adjunct instructor at the St. Petersburg State University in Russia. He has a company, Global Science Research, that he uses for his non-academic research.
He put up an app on Facebook called “This Is Your Digital Life” that he said was for research by psychologists. He failed to mentioned that the app created a data base of the private information of those who used it, but could also take the information of friends of the users. He also failed to disclose the possibility of sale of that data to others.
The BBC reported that Facebook has determined the app hit 87 million users. This despite only 305,000 users actually taking the quiz in the app.
In Part 3 I’ll cover the Canadian whistle-blower and the company he helped to found in British Columbia before joining Cambridge Analytica..
April 10, 2018 15 Comments
