MPs to question Facebook over sale of data to Cambridge Analytica
By James Cook 25 JULY 2019 • 7:35PM
telegraph.co.uk
MPs will write to Facebook next week to demand answers over a US filing that said “a substantial quantity” of Facebook data was sold to Cambridge Analytica by a researcher.
The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) this week accused Facebook of making “misleading statements” about misuse of personal data of tens of millions of its users.
Its complaint against the company said that a researcher, previously named as former Cambridge University professor Aleksandr Kogan, had sold data harvested from Facebook users' profiles to Cambridge Analytica, the British consultancy employed in Donald Trump's election campaign.
The researcher had told Facebook in 2016 that he had sold data to Cambridge Analytica, but the company did not disclose that he had transferred data until last year. Facebook announced this week that it had agreed to pay $100m (£79.9m) to the SEC in order to settle the complaint.
On Thursday, the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee, said it would write to Facebook over the matter.
A report prepared by a barrister acting on behalf of Cambridge Analytica last year wrote that the company paid £233,000 to GSR, a business set up by Mr Kogan, but concentrated on personality profiles derived from the Facebook data, rather than the Facebook data itself.
The SEC accused Facebook of being aware of the sale of data in 2018, but claimed that the technology giant “misleadingly presented the potential for misuse of user data as merely a hypothetical investment risk.”
Facebook eventually disclosed the transfer of data to Cambridge Analytics in March 2018.
The complaint also alleged that Facebook employees had described Cambridge Analytica as “sketchy (to say the least)” in 2015.
The continued scrutiny of Facebook comes after the company agreed to pay a $5bn fine to the US Federal Trade Commission to settle privacy concerns in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
Nick Clegg, the company’s head of global affairs, told BBC Radio 4 on Thursday that Facebook would carry out “a complete overhaul deep into the bowels of the company itself in how data is handled".
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