Tag: SCL Group

In December 2015, the Guardian revealed that Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign was using psychological profiles based on data harvested from tens of millions of Facebook users. Facebook attempted to dampen the impact of Wylie’s whistleblowing interviews by publishing its own mea culpa and banning Cambridge Analytica and SCL Group from its platform, hours before publication but two years after the data breach was first reported. The day after Wylie’s bombshell revelations, US congressional investigators from the house intelligence committee asked Cambridge Analytica’s CEO, Nix, to testify before Congress. On Sunday 25 March, Wylie spoke about Cambridge Analytica connections to AggregateIQ, a Canadian firm that worked with different leave campaigns in the European referendum. Play Video 1:18 Soon afterwards, US watchdogs filed a legal complaint against Cambridge Analytica with the Federal Election Commission. How academic at centre of Facebook scandal tried – and failed – to spin personal data into gold Read more Vote Leave has repeatedly denied coordination between the campaigns and said the donation was legitimate under election law. Facebook suspended AggregateIQ, a data firm with which the Vote Leave campaign spent 40% of its budget, on 6 April, following reports that it was connected to SCL. That same week, Zuckerberg faced 10 hours of questioning by members of Congress. Nix was summoned to appear before a British parliamentary committee on fake news the following week for questioning over “inconsistencies” in evidence he had given the committee in February, when he claimed: “We do not work with Facebook data, and we do not have Facebook data.” However, on 17 April he cancelled his appearance, citing the ICO’s ongoing investigation into his company. On 2 May, the same day that Cambridge Analytica announced it was going into liquidation, Chris Vickery of the data security firm Upguard gave evidence to the digital, culture, media and sport committee that the Trump campaign had access to psychological profiles derived from Facebook data, that AIQ and Cambridge Analytica were technologically entwined and that illegal co-ordination of data by leave campaigns was “indisputable”.