Developer of App That Harvested Facebook Data Says It Didn't Prove Useful
April 24 2018 - 2:00PM
Dow Jones News
By Jenny Gross
LONDON -- The academic at the center of a controversy about the
misuse of Facebook Inc.'s data played down the effectiveness of his
personality-profiling technique, telling a committee of British
lawmakers Tuesday that the data he compiled wasn't a useful way to
target individuals with advertising.
Aleksandr Kogan, a social psychologist and lecturer at the
University of Cambridge, developed an app in which respondents
authorized access to their Facebook profiles and to those of their
friends, allowing him to harvest data from as many as 87 million of
its users.
He later shared the information with political consultancy
Cambridge Analytica, which worked for President Donald Trump's 2016
election campaign. Cambridge Analytica has acknowledged it licensed
data from Mr. Kogan but said it wasn't used in the U.S.
presidential race
Clients of Cambridge Analytica have said the company had trouble
delivering on its claims that its personality-profiling would help
politicians win votes. Mr. Kogan said the data turned out to be of
zero value to the company, and his app was less effective at
targeting consumers than Facebook's traditional advertising.
"The idea that this data is accurate, I would say, is
scientifically ridiculous," he told a committee of U.K. lawmakers
investigating fake news. "The project, quite frankly, if the goal
is microtargeting using Facebook ads, makes no sense. It's not what
you would do."
In a parliamentary hearing that lasted two hours, Mr. Kogan
denied wrongdoing but said he should have been clearer that the
information he was collecting from users might be used for
political purposes. He said he created the app in part for research
into how people express emotions online.
Both Facebook and Cambridge Analytica have sought to shift blame
to Mr. Kogan for improperly using data. Facebook has banned Mr.
Kogan from the social network and deleted his profile, pending
further investigation into his use of data for commercial
purposes.
Mr. Kogan on Tuesday said Facebook had unfairly singled him out
and denied breaking Facebook's rules, saying that the company
doesn't have a valid policy for app developers.
"Fundamentally, I made a mistake by not being critical about
this and trusting the advice of another company," he said, adding
that Cambridge Analytica had assured him nothing he did was in
violation of the network's policies.
Cambridge Analytica sold its services to prospective clients by
saying it would design ads to target specific personality types.
For example, it would deliver an emotional ad to someone whose
personality would resonate with that type of message. Cambridge
Analytica spokesman Clarence Mitchell said their personality
profiling was legitimate and called the information Mr. Kogan
provided useless.
The controversy, first reported by the U.K.'s Observer and the
New York Times, has shone an uncomfortable spotlight on Facebook,
which has sought to repair trust with regulators and members of the
public in recent weeks. Damian Collins, the committee's chair, said
at the hearing that he didn't believe Facebook had been clear about
what it did with users' data.
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
April 24, 2018 13:45 ET (17:45 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2018 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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