Facebook knew Cambridge Analytica was misusing users' data 3 years ago and only banned it this week

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https://qz.com/1231643/cambridge-analytica-illegally-obtained-data-from-50-million-facebook-users-to-run-trump-ads/

Facebook knew Cambridge Analytica was misusing users’ data three years ago and only banned the company this week
Written by Annalisa Merelli

New ways in which Facebook might have played a role in 2016 election meddling continue to emerge. Yesterday (March 16), the company announced the suspension of data analytics company Strategic Communication Laboratories (SCL) and its prominent parent political firm Cambridge Analytica—three years after it illegally used the data of up to 50 million users.

According to a note shared by the company, in 2015 Facebook found out that, despite telling its users otherwise, Cambridge professor Aleksandr Kogan passed user data collected through personality testing app “thisisyourdigitallife” (which touted itself as a personality test used by psychologists) to the political firm Cambridge Analytica—a company owned by Robert Mercer and led by Steve Bannon at the time—and to Christopher Wylie, from a digital service company called Eunoia Technologies.

The 270,000 people who downloaded the app allowed it access not only to their data, but some of their friends’—depending on their settings. However, they did not authorize that their data be shared with other companies, a behavior that is in violation of Facebook platform policies. The revelation comes from reporting by The Observer.

According to Wylie, a whistleblower who detailed the illegal data use, saying the information was used in 2014 to profile individual US voters who were then served Donald Trump ads during the election. “We exploited Facebook to harvest millions of people’s profiles. And built models to exploit what we knew about them and target their inner demons,” Wylie told The Observer, “That was the basis that the entire company was built on.”