Facebook Data Harvester Says Company Didn't Care
The Cambridge University academic who harvested data from Facebook on behalf of Cambridge Analytica has spoken out in response to him being scapegoated by the social media company.
Aleksandr Kogan developed a personality app on Facebook which then mined data from participants and their friends, resulting in the data of 87 million users being taken off the site.
In a statement following the scandal Facebook CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg has tried to distance himself from Kogan and Cambridge Analytica.
He insisted they both had violated their terms by taking data from the site and announced Facebook was suspending them both from the platform pending further investigation over misuse of data.
"My view is that I’m being basically used as a scapegoat by both Facebook and Cambridge Analytica," Kogan told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme last month. "Honestly we thought we were acting perfectly appropriately. We thought we were doing something that was really normal."
Now in another interview Kogan has gone further, this time claiming Facebook were aware of what was going on and did not care or ever object to what was going on.
"I think that the core idea we had - that everybody knows, and nobody cares - was wrong," he told CBS News.
Kogan claims that while his personality quiz questionnaire was a clear breach of Facebook's code of conduct, the company did not act on it despite being aware.
“This is the frustrating bit, where Facebook clearly has never cared. I mean, it’s never enforced this agreement,” he said.
Kogan's comments are at odds with Zuckerberg's statements ahead of appearing in front of Congress earlier this month, where he accepted responsibility for the data breach but claimed that he did not grasp how the data of the platform's users might be abused.
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