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On January 9, 2019 the UK Information Commissioner's Office fined SCL Elections, also known as Cambridge Analytica, £15,000 for failure to comply with an enforcement notice the ICO issued in May 2018 ordering the company to respond in full to a subject access request submitted by US-based academic David Carroll. The company was also required to pay £6,000 in costs and a victim surcharge of £170. Information Commissioner Elizabeth Denham noted that UK data protection laws apply to all data…
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In May 2018, Facebook said that as part of its investigation into how Cambridge Analytica had abused personal data on the social network, it had investigated thousands of apps on its platform and suspended about 200 of them. The company said it was investigating further to identify every app that may have misused users' personal data before the site's policy changed in 2014. Facebook said it would ban any further apps it found and notify users through a dedicated web page. Among those suspended…
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In July 2018 the UK's Information Commissioner's Office announced it would fine Facebook £500,000, the maximum under the 1998 data protection law, for failing to safeguard its users' information and lacking transparency about how the data was harvested and used by others, specifically Cambridge Analytica. Under the new General Data Protection Regulation, Information Commissioner Elizabeth Denham said the fine would have been much higher. The inquiry that led to the fine also led the ICO to send…
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In a 2018 interview, the Stanford professor of organisational behaviour Michal Kosinski discussed his research, which included a controversial and widely debunked 2017 study claiming that his algorithms could distinguish gay and straight faces; a 2013 study of 58,000 people that explored the relationship between Facebook Likes and psychological and demographic characteristics; and the myPersonality project, which collected data on 6 million people via a personality quiz that went viral on…
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In 2015, Facebook removed a feature that had been in place for some years that allowed developers to access information about Friends who had also signed up for their app. During that time, about 270,000 people downloaded and installed an app that was portrayed as part of an online personality quiz that offered a small payment to users who completed it. That app, This Is Your Digital Life, allowed University of Cambridge researcher Aleksandr Kogan to harvest data on an estimated 50 million…
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According to whistleblower Christopher Wylie, during the 2014 US midtern elections, Cambridge Analytica, needing data to complete the new products it had promised to political advisor Steve Bannon, harvested private information from the Facebook profiles of more than 50 million users without their permission. There was enough information about 30 million of these users to match them to other records and build psychographic profiles.
After the news became public in March 2018, Facebook…
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In what proved to be the first of several years of scandals over the use of personal data in illegal, anti-democratic campaigning, in 2015 the Guardian discovered that Ted Cruz's campaign for the US presidency paid at least $750,000 that year to use tens of millions of profiles of Facebook users gathered without their permission by Cambridge Analytica, owned by London-based Strategic Communications Laboratories. Financially supported by leading Republican donor Robert Mercer, CA amassed these…