Twitter reportedly gave access to public data to the Cambridge University researcher whose Facebook personality quiz data was used by the now infamous data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica.
Cambridge University researcher Aleksandr Kogan — who sold Facebook personality quiz data to Cambridge Analaytica — reportedly launched his own firm Global Science Research (GSR).
In a statement to Bloomberg, Twitter said, “GSR did have one-time API access to a random sample of public tweets from a five-month period from December 2014 to April 2015.”
Twitter confirmed to the Telegraph that the company sold Twitter data to Kogan. However, Twitter has not disclosed how much Kogan paid for the data.
“Based on the recent reports, we conducted our own internal review and did not find any access to private data about people who use Twitter,” said Twitter, in the same statement to Bloomberg.
Additionally, Twitter has since removed Cambridge Analytica and its affiliates from the social media company’s list of advertisers.
Cambridge Analytica published a tweet on April 30th, 2018 denying that it received Twitter data from Kogan or GSR.
Cambridge Analytica has never received Twitter data from GSR or
Aleksandr Kogan, and has never done any work with GSR on Twitter data. GSR was only ever a contractor to Cambridge Analytica and we understand it did work for many other companies.— Cambridge Analytica (@CamAnalytica) April 30, 2018
Facebook is currently being investigated by the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada for its role in the Cambridge Analytica privacy scandal.
Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has since apologized for his company’s role in the scandal. Zuckerberg also appeared before the U.S. Congress and Senate to testify on behalf of his company.
Source: Bloomberg, The Telegraph, Twitter
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