19 March,2018 01:00 PM IST | Washington | Agencies
Donald Trump. Pic/AFP
Facebook says it has suspended the account of Cambridge Analytica, the data analysis firm hired by Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign, after reports that it harvested the profile information of millions of US voters without their permission.
As per the New York Times and Observer, the firm stole info from 50 million FB users' profiles in the tech giant's biggest-ever data breach, to help them design software to predict and influence voters' choices at the ballot box.
Also suspended were the accounts of its parent organisation, Strategic Communication Laboratories, and those of University of Cambridge psychologist Aleksandr Kogan and Christopher Wylie, who runs Eunoia Technologies.
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Cambridge Analytica was bankrolled to the tune of $15 million by US hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, a major Republican donor. The Observer said it was headed at the time by Steve Bannon.
"In 2015, we learned that ... Kogan lied to us and violated our Platform Policies by passing data from an app that was using Facebook Login to SCL/Cambridge Analytica, a firm that does political, government and military work around
the globe," Facebook said in a posting late on Friday.
Data breach claims false, says Facebook
After suspending SCL and Cambridge Analytica, Facebook has denied any data breach as claimed by some media reports. "The claim that this is a data breach is completely false," its vice-president and deputy general counsel Paul Grewal said on Saturday.
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