Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Cambridge Analytica's CEO answered British MPs' questions about election influence last month

The attorney general for the US state of Massachusetts is launching an investigation into alleged harvesting of Facebook profiles by a firm employed by Donald Trump's election campaign.

Investigations by the Observer and New York Times newspapers claim details from 50 million profiles were gathered without the users' knowledge.

The company, Cambridge Analytica, was suspended from Facebook on Friday.

Both Facebook and Cambridge Analytica deny any wrongdoing.

The American data analysis firm - which is not associated with the famous British university - is well known for the role it played in President Trump's election campaign, where it provided intricate data on the thoughts of American voters.

Allegations against it centre on a professor from the University of Cambridge, Aleksandr Kogan, who designed a personality testing Facebook app called thisisyourdigitallife. The app was a private enterprise, and not part of his university work.

The app, created in November 2013 for the Facebook platform, asked users for permission to access their profile information - and also that of their friends'.

It is alleged that Mr Kogan then sold that data on to Cambridge Analytica, in violation of Facebook's policies.

A whistleblower who worked at Cambridge Analytica spoke to The Guardian, claiming that he worked with Mr Kogan "to harvest millions of people's profiles."

"We exploited Facebook... and built models to exploit what we knew about them and target their inner demons. That was the basis the entire company was built on," he said.

How did it access so many profiles?

Image copyright Getty Images

Mr Kogan's app requested permission from people taking his personality quiz to access some information from their Facebook profiles.

About 265,000 people had downloaded the app at the time - and it also asked for permission to request "more limited information" from the user's friends.

Facebook says this "is no longer possible" - but at the time, such a request was controlled by the privacy settings of that user's friends. So if a user had their account set to allow sharing with a friend's apps, and the friend gave permission to Mr Kogan's app, it could read some information.

Facebook's policies, however, said that this data can only be used for the app's stated purpose - and cannot be transferred or sold on.

Cambridge Analytica, however, said that once the company learned about how the data provided by Mr Kogan was sourced, it deleted all the relevant records, in December 2015.

It said none of that data was used in the services it provided to Mr Trump's campaign. It added that it did not use or hold data from Facebook profiles​.

But in a statement, Facebook wrote that it had "we received reports that, contrary to the certifications we were given, not all data was deleted".

A spokesperson for Facebook also said that the data collection was not a hack or a breach.

"People knowingly provided their information, no systems were infiltrated, and no passwords or sensitive pieces of information were stolen or hacked," the company said.

Britain's Observer newspaper reports that the incident was known about more than two years ago.

But the newspaper said Facebook's action to ban Cambridge Analytica and its parent group SCL this week happened four days after its reporters contacted the social network for comment about its upcoming story.

On Saturday, as the story emerged in newspapers, the UK Information Commissioner, the country's main data protection regulator, said it was "investigating the circumstances in which Facebook data may have been illegally acquired and used".

However, the statement did not mention Mr Kogan, his company, or Cambridge Analytica, instead saying it was part of an "ongoing investigation into the use of data analytics for political purposes".

Alexander Nix, founder of Cambridge Analytica, was interviewed by a committee of British MPs last month on the firm's practices.</s>WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Massachusetts attorney general said on Saturday her office was launching an investigation after reports that Cambridge Analytica had harvested private information from more than 50 million Facebook users in developing techniques to support President Donald Trump's 2016 election campaign.

"Massachusetts residents deserve answers immediately from Facebook and Cambridge Analytica. We are launching an investigation," Maura Healey said on Twitter in a post that linked to a New York Times report on the issue. [L1N1QZ02Q]

 

 (Reporting by David Brunnstrom; Editing by Paul Simao)</s>Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey announced Saturday that her office is opening an investigation into Facebook and the data firm Cambridge Analytica, which has ties to the Trump campaign.

"Massachusetts residents deserve answers immediately from Facebook and Cambridge Analytica. We are launching an investigation," Healey tweeted.

Healey's office did not immediately reply to CNN's request for further comment on the investigation.

On Friday, Facebook's vice president and deputy general counsel, Paul Grewal, said in a detailed statement that a University of Cambridge psychology professor, Aleksandr Kogan, had provided Facebook user data he gained through an app to third-parties, including Cambridge Analytica -- a breach of the social media site's policies on protecting people's information.

Although Cambridge Analytica told Facebook the data was destroyed, the social media site's statement said it recently received reports that indicated otherwise and was suspending the data firm, its parent company Strategic Communication Laboratories, Kogan, and another person he shared the information with, Christopher Wylie of Eunoia Technologies Inc. A spokesperson for Cambridge Analytica denied that the organization is in violation of Facebook's terms and said it is in communication with the social media site. Cambridge Analytica was hired in summer 2016 as part of the Trump campaign's three-pronged data operation.</s>Facebook has banned Cambridge Analytica, a data analytics firm that played a key role in multiple populist political campaigns, including Brexit and the presidential campaign of Donald Trump.

Facebook announced that it would ban the account of Cambridge Analytica’s parent company, Strategic Communication Laboratories, in addition to the accounts of Aleksandr Kogan, a psychologist at the University of Cambridge, and Christopher Wylie, an employee of Eunoia Technologies.

In their post explaining the ban, Facebook said that Kogan passed user data obtained via Facebook to Cambridge Analytica and to Wylie, and that both Wylie and Cambridge Analytica failed to delete this data.

Facebook conceded that Kogan “gained access to this information in a legitimate way and through the proper channels that governed all developers on Facebook at that time,” but said by passing the data to third parties “he did not subsequently abide by our rules.”

In 2015, when Facebook learned that Kogan had shared the results of his research on Facebook users with Cambridge Analytica and Wylie, they asked them to delete the data, and received assurances from both that this had been done.

Facebook said that their decision to ban Cambridge Analytica’s parent company was made on the basis of reports that they are currently investigating.

Several days ago, we received reports that, contrary to the certifications we were given, not all data was deleted. We are moving aggressively to determine the accuracy of these claims. If true, this is another unacceptable violation of trust and the commitments they made.

Cambridge Analytica has been at the heart of several high-profile campaigns on the political right. The company initially attracted Ted Cruz as a client during the Republican primaries in 2015-16, and went on to work for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. Another client of Cambridge Analytica was Leave.Eu, the successful campaign for British withdrawal from the European Union.

Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News. You can follow him on Twitter, Gab.ai and add him on Facebook. Email tips and suggestions to allumbokhari@protonmail.com.</s>When it comes to political campaigns, it's helpful to understand the people whose votes you're trying to win. Personal data can help strategists shape messaging and advertising so that the right potential voter views the most influential ads. And according to an investigation by The New York Times and The Observer, the Trump campaign turned to one such firm, a company called Cambridge Analytica. But what exactly is Cambridge Analytica? According to co-founder and former employee Christopher Wylie, it helps to develop "psychological warfare" techniques to advance Republican political agendas.

A significant portion of the joint investigation relies on interviews with Wylie, who left the firm in 2014. "Rules don't matter for them," Wylie described the company's leadership to the Times. "For them, this is a war, and it's all fair." In tweets, the company denies that Wylie was a co-founder, and instead describe him as a contractor.

"They want to fight a culture war in America," Wylie told reporters. "Cambridge Analytica was supposed to be the arsenal of weapons to fight that culture war."

Cambridge Analytica is reportedly under investigation for collecting personal data without first getting Facebook users' permission. The company claimed in a statement that they themselves did not mine any Facebook data. Instead, the statement says, they had contracted a separate group called Global Science Research — and Cambridge Analytica claims it believed the contracted company would follow Facebook's rules and receive consent from users.

Cambridge Analytica is partly owned by billionaire Republican Robert Mercer, who invested $15 million in the company, the Times reported. Steve Bannon was Mercer's political adviser at the time, and according to the Times, Cambridge Analytica reportedly promised Bannon a new way to influence would-be voters. Mercer was reportedly interested in bolstering his influence on Republican politics. Forbes reports that Mercer spent $25 million in the 2016 election, alone.

But according the report, the company didn't yet have the information necessary to do so, which is why it turned to Facebook users. The Times reports that more than 50 Facebook million users were affected by the data harvesting.

After reports of the data harvesting began to circulate, Facebook suspended Cambridge Analytica, Wylie, Aleksandr Kogan (the academic reportedly behind GSR), as well as Strategic Communications Laboratories (SCL), the behavior research company behind Cambridge Analytica. "Protecting people's information is at the heart of everything we do, and we require the same from people who operate apps on Facebook," said Paul Grewal, Facebook Vice President and General Deputy Counsel, in a statement.

According to Grewal, Cambridge Anlaytica gained access to users' information through Kogan, a professor at the University of Cambridge. Grewal says that Kogan went through the proper channels to run an app through Facebook, but that he then took the data his app collected from users and passed that information along to Cambridge Analytica. Grewal said that Kogan lied to Facebook and, in passing along the data, violated their platform policies.

Though Cambridge Analytica says it deleted information it obtained through GSR, an unnamed former employee told the Times that this was false. Reportedly, this person had seen large amounts of unencrypted Facebook data on the company's servers. (In a tweet, Cambridge Analytica said that such "'unnamed sources' are not familiar" with the company's databases.)

Several U.S. lawmakers have announced that they would like to further investigate Cambridge Analytica's actions. Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey tweeted that her office was launching an investigation because she believes her state's residents deserve answers. Similarly, Sen. Ed Markey said he wanted to see both Cambridge Analytica and Facebook testify before the Senate Commerce Committee "so that we can get to the bottom of these disturbing reports that may impact tens of millions of Americans."

Whether or not officials from either company will go before Congress is yet unclear, though Special Counsel Robert Mueller reportedly requested information from the company as part of his investigation into potential Russian interference in the 2016 presidential campaign. The company denies that any information obtained through GSR was used in their work for the Trump campaign</s>Data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica harvested private information from more than 50 million Facebook users without permission to develop techniques to support President Donald Trump’s 2016 election campaign, it has emerged.

In a Saturday report, London’s quoted whistle-blower Christopher Wylie, who helped set up Cambridge Analytica and worked with an academic at Cambridge University to obtain the data, as saying the system could profile individual voters to target them with personalised political advertisements.

“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. That was the basis that the entire company was built on,” Wylie told The Observer.

said Cambridge Analytica used the data, taken without authorisation in early 2014, to build a software program to predict and influence choices at the ballot box.

The data breach is one of the biggest in the history of Facebook Inc, and both reported on Saturday.

In the wake of the revelation, Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey said on Twitter that her office was launching an investigation. “Massachusetts residents deserve answers immediately from Facebook and Cambridge Analytica,” she said.

Facebook said on Friday that it was suspending Cambridge Analytica after finding data privacy policies had been violated.

The more than 50 million profiles represented about a third of active North American Facebook users, and nearly a quarter of potential US voters, at the time, The Observer said.

said interviews with a half-dozen former Cambridge Analytica employees and contractors, and a review of the firm’s emails and documents, revealed it not only relied on the private Facebook data but still possesses most or all of it.

said the data was collected through an app called thisisyourdigitallife, built by academic Aleksandr Kogan, separately from his work at Cambridge University.

Through Kogan’s company Global Science Research (GSR), in collaboration with Cambridge Analytica, hundreds of thousands of users were paid to take a personality test and agreed to have their data collected for academic use, The Observer said.

However, the app also collected the information of the test-takers’ Facebook friends, leading to the accumulation of a data pool tens of millions-strong, the newspaper said.

It said Facebook’s “platform policy” allowed only collection of friends data to improve user experience in the app and barred it from being sold on or used for advertising.

Facebook said on Friday it had also suspended Cambridge Analytica’s parent group Strategic Communication Laboratories (SCL) after receiving reports they did not delete information about Facebook users that had been inappropriately shared.

A spokesman for Cambridge Analytica said GSR “was contractually committed by us to only obtain data in accordance with the UK Data Protection Act and to seek the informed consent of each respondent.”

“When it subsequently became clear that the data had not been obtained by GSR in line with Facebook’s terms of service, Cambridge Analytica deleted all data received from GSR,” he said.

“We worked with Facebook over this period to ensure that they were satisfied that we had not knowingly breached any of Facebook’s terms of service and also provided a signed statement to confirm that all Facebook data and their derivatives had been deleted,” the spokesman said.

He said “no data from GSR was used by Cambridge Analytica as part of the services it provided to the Donald Trump 2016 presidential campaign.”

The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment. Facebook did not mention the Trump campaign or any other campaigns in its statement.

“We will take legal action if necessary to hold them responsible and accountable for any unlawful behaviour,” Facebook said, adding that it was continuing to investigate the claims.

In a Twitter post, Facebook Chief Security Officer Alex Stamos called the news reports “important and powerful” but said it was “incorrect to call this a ‘breach’ under any reasonable definition of the term.”

“We can condemn this behaviour while being accurate in our description of it,” he said.

Acknowledging an episode as a data breach can carry legal significance, as companies face a patchwork of state and federal requirements to notify customers and regulators when they detect that information has been compromised.

Trump’s campaign hired Cambridge Analytica in June 2016 and paid it more than US$6.2 million, according to Federal Election Commission records.

On its website, Cambridge Analytica says it “provided the Donald J. Trump for President campaign with the expertise and insights that helped win the White House.”

Brad Parscale, who ran Trump’s digital ad operation in 2016 and is his 2020 re-election campaign manager, declined to comment on Friday.

In past interviews with Reuters, he has said Cambridge Analytica played a minor role as a contractor in the 2016 campaign, and that the campaign used voter data from a Republican-affiliated organisation rather than Cambridge Analytica.

Senator Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the US Senate Intelligence Committee, said the case was “more evidence that the online political advertising market is essentially the Wild West” and showed the need for Congress to pass legislation to bring transparency and accountability to online political advertisements.

A source close to the congressional investigations into Russian meddling in the 2016 campaign said the Trump campaign likely will need to address whether it was aware of Cambridge Analytica’s methods for obtaining its data or if the data was leveraged during the election.

The suspension means Cambridge Analytica and SCL cannot buy ads on the world’s largest social media network or administer pages belonging to clients, Andrew Bosworth, a Facebook vice-president, said in a Twitter post.

Cambridge Analytica says it uses “behavioural microtargeting,” or combining analysis of people’s personalities with demographics, to predict and influence mass behaviour. It says it has data on 220 million Americans, two-thirds of the US population.

It has worked on other campaigns in the United States and other countries, and is funded by Robert Mercer, a prominent supporter of politically conservative groups.

Facebook in its statement described a rocky relationship with Cambridge Analytica, Kogan and Wylie going back to 2015.

That year, Facebook said, it learned that Kogan lied to the company and violated its policies by sharing data he acquired with a so-called “research app” that used Facebook’s login system.

Kogan was not immediately available for comment.

The thisisyourdigitallife app was downloaded by about 270,000 people. Facebook said Kogan gained access to profile and other information “in a legitimate way” but “he did not subsequently abide by our rules” when he passed the data to SCL/Cambridge Analytica and Wylie.

Facebook said it cut ties to Kogan’s app when it learned of the violation in 2015, and asked for certification from Kogan and all parties he had given data to that the information had been destroyed.

Although all certified they had destroyed the data, Facebook said it received reports in the past several days that “not all data was deleted,” prompting the suspension announced on Friday.</s>SAN FRANCISCO (CBS/AP) — Facebook suspended Cambridge Analytica, a data-analysis firm that worked for President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, over allegations that it held onto improperly obtained user data after telling Facebook it had deleted the information.

The social network issued a blog post explaining its decision, although the tale is convoluted. Years ago, Facebook said, Cambridge Analytica received user data from a Facebook app that purported to be a psychological research tool, though the firm wasn’t authorized to have that information. Roughly 270,000 people downloaded the app and shared their personal details with it, Facebook said.

Cambridge Analytica later certified in 2015 that it had destroyed the information that it received, according to Facebook, although the social network said it received reports “several days ago” that not all the data was deleted.

While it investigates the matter, Facebook has also suspended the access of Cambridge Analytica’s parent company, Strategic Communication Laboratories; the academic who created the app in question, a University of Cambridge psychology professor named Aleksandr Kogan; and another individual, Christopher Wylie of Eunoia Technologies, who also allegedly received the user data from the app.

Exactly why the handling of this data warranted both suspension and Facebook’s unusual public explanation of the move wasn’t clear. The blog post, written by Facebook deputy general counsel Paul Grewal, cited the “public prominence” of Cambridge Analytica, called the alleged data retention an “unacceptable violation of trust” and said the social network will take legal action if necessary to hold all parties “responsible and accountable for any unlawful behavior.”

In a statement, a Cambridge Analytica spokesman denied any wrongdoing. He said the parent company’s SCL Elections unit hired Kogan to undertake “a large scale research project in the U.S.,” but later learned that he had obtained data in violation of Facebook policies, and subsequently deleted all data it received from Kogan’s company. For the “avoidance of doubt,” the spokesman said, none of Kogan’s data was used in Cambridge Analytica’s 2016 election work.

Kogan did not immediately reply to an emailed request for comment. Wylie could not immediately be located.

Cambridge Analytica is probably best known for its political work in the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign. The company claims to build psychological profiles based on personal details from millions of Americans that can categorize individual voters. It worked for both the primary campaign of Texas senator Ted Cruz and the Trump general-election campaign .

The firm is backed by the family of billionaire donor Robert Mercer, a hedge fund manager who also supported the Trump campaign and other conservative candidates and causes. Trump campaign officials have downplayed Cambridge Analytica’s role, saying they briefly used the company for television advertising and paid some of its most skilled data employees.

But the company has also surfaced a few times during the probes into Russian interference in the 2016 election. For instance, Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who is now cooperating with special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation after pleading guilty to a felony charge , disclosed an advisory role with Cambridge Analytica last August. SCL later said that position never materialized.

Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix also disclosed last November that the company reached out to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange during the campaign to request emails related to the Hillary Clinton campaign. Nix said Assange said no. Clinton campaign emails stolen by Russian agents are one focus of the election-interference probes. Nix has denied any involvement in Russian election meddling.

© Copyright 2018 Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed</s>Facebook suspends data analytics firm that worked for Trump campaign

Facebook said in a statement that it suspended Cambridge Analytica and its parent group Strategic Communication Laboratories (SCL) after receiving reports that they did not delete information about Facebook users that had been inappropriately shared. — Reuters picSAN FRANCISCO, March 17 — Facebook Inc yesterday said it was suspending political data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica, which worked for President Donald Trump’s 2016 election campaign, after finding data privacy policies had been violated.

Facebook said in a statement that it suspended Cambridge Analytica and its parent group Strategic Communication Laboratories (SCL) after receiving reports that they did not delete information about Facebook users that had been inappropriately shared.

Cambridge Analytica was not immediately available for comment. Facebook did not mention the Trump campaign or any political campaigns in its statement, attributed to company Deputy General Counsel Paul Grewal.

“We will take legal action if necessary to hold them responsible and accountable for any unlawful behaviour,” Facebook said, adding that it was continuing to investigate the claims.

Cambridge Analytica worked for the failed presidential campaign of US Senator Ted Cruz and then for the presidential campaign of Donald Trump. On its website, it says it “provided the Donald J. Trump for President campaign with the expertise and insights that helped win the White House”.

Brad Parscale, who ran Trump’s digital ad operation in 2016 and is his 2020 campaign manager, declined to comment yesterday.

In past interviews with Reuters, Parscale has said that Cambridge Analytica played a minor role as a contractor in the 2016 Trump campaign, and that the campaign used voter data from a Republican-affiliated organisation rather than Cambridge Analytica.

Facebook’s Grewal said the company was taking the unusual step of announcing the suspension “given the public prominence” of Cambridge Analytica and its parent organisation.

The suspension means Cambridge Analytica and SCL cannot buy ads on the world’s largest social media network or administer pages belonging to clients, Andrew Bosworth, a Facebook vice president, said in a Twitter post.

Trump’s campaign hired Cambridge Analytica in June 2016 and paid it more than US$6.2 million, according to Federal Election Commission records.

Cambridge Analytica says it uses “behavioural microtargeting”, or combining analysis of people’s personalities with demographics, to predict and influence mass behaviour. It says it has data on 220 million Americans, two thirds of the US population.

It has worked on other campaigns in the United States and other countries, and it is funded by Robert Mercer, a prominent supporter of politically conservative groups.

Facebook in its statement described a rocky relationship with Cambridge Analytica and two individuals going back to 2015.

That year, Facebook said, it learned that University of Cambridge professor Aleksandr Kogan lied to the company and violated its policies by sharing data that he acquired with a so-called “research app” that used Facebook’s login system.

Kogan was not immediately available for comment.

The app was downloaded by about 270,000 people. Facebook said that Kogan gained access to profile and other information “in a legitimate way” but “he did not subsequently abide by our rules” when he passed the data to SCL/Cambridge Analytica and Christopher Wylie of Eunoia Technologies. Eunoia did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Facebook said it cut ties to Kogan’s app when it learned of the violation in 2015, and asked for certification from Kogan and all parties he had given data to that the information had been destroyed.

Although all certified that they had destroyed the data, Facebook said that it received reports in the past several days that “not all data was deleted”, prompting the suspension announced yesterday. — Reuters</s>Facebook Suspends Political Data Firm Used In Trump Campaign

Facebook has suspended the data analytics firm that the Trump campaign relied on during the 2016 election, saying the firm improperly received user data and then may have failed to get rid of it.

On Friday, the social media giant announced that Cambridge Analytica; parent company Strategic Communication Laboratories; Christopher Wylie, who helped found Cambridge Analytica; and U.K.-based professor Aleksandr Kogan were all barred from Facebook pending an investigation.

Kogan of the University of Cambridge came up with an app billed on Facebook as a personality predictor "used by psychologists." About 270,000 people downloaded "thisisyourdigitallife," according to Facebook, and in doing so gave away their data; some — depending on security settings — even gave away information about their Facebook friends.

Although users may not have realized it, the mining of their personal information was aboveboard; just by downloading the app they had — knowingly or not — consented to giving it away.

But they did not consent to Kogan giving it away, Facebook says. And when Kogan passed on their data to Cambridge Analytica, he violated platform policies against sharing information with a third party.

Facebook says it learned about what happened in 2015 and removed the app, then demanded Kogan, Cambridge Analytica and SCL destroy the data. Facebook says it was assured by each entity the data was gone.

Now Facebook says it recently learned those assurances may have been false.

"Several days ago, we received reports that, contrary to the certifications we were given, not all data was deleted," Facebook Vice President and Deputy General Counsel Paul Grewal said in a statement Friday. "We are moving aggressively to determine the accuracy of these claims."

In its own statement, it concedes it contracted with and received data from Global Science Research, a company led by Kogan, but says that when it learned that the user information was not obtained in line with Facebook's terms of service, it deleted all of it.

Cambridge Analytica says it is committed to receiving information in accordance with the UK Data Protection Act "and to seek the informed consent of each respondent."

To what extent the Trump campaign and Cambridge Analytica were intertwined remains murky.

Billionaire Republican donor Robert Mercer, who donated to the Trump campaign, backs Cambridge Analytica, having invested millions of dollars in the company. And Trump's former chief strategist Steve Bannon sat on its board, even naming the company, according The New York Times.

According to the newspaper, "the firm was effectively a shell" based in the U.K. and run by foreigners whose contracts with American campaigns — including that of presidential hopeful Ted Cruz — possibly violated Federal Election Commission rules. (The Times interviewed Wylie, who has since left the company and runs another firm.)

The Trump campaign says it briefly used Cambridge Analytica for TV ads and paid some of its data employees, according to The Associated Press.

But congressional investigators have questioned CEO Alexander Nix about the company's role in the campaign.

Nix said last fall that the firm reached out to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in the runup to the election to request emails connected to the Hillary Clinton campaign. WikiLeaks said no. It was around the same time that Cambridge began working for the Trump campaign, reports The Wall Street Journal.

The Journal also reports that the firm has become ensnared in Justice Department special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

The company says it uses data analytics and behavioral psychology to boost the clients' campaigns. Nix has denied to the U.K. Parliament that the company gets its data from Facebook.

And yet as the firm sought to build "psychographic profiles" to help discern whom Internet users are and how political messaging might be tailored to them, it turned to Kogan, the Cambridge University psychology professor. The Times says Kogan created the app using a technique developed at the school's Psychometrics Centre, which is designed to map personality traits based Facebook likes. Kogan then put the app on Facebook under the false pretense of using it for academic purposes.

All told, the Times says Kogan handed over more than 50 million profiles to Cambridge Analytica, including information from app users' friends — who had never consented to forgoing their data. Around 30 million of those profiles contained enough information to build psychographic profiles, the newspaper says.

The firm said in its statement, "No data from GSR was used by Cambridge Analytica as part of the services it provided to the Donald Trump 2016 presidential campaign."

Facebook says it will take legal action if it finds something unlawful occurred.</s>
• Data firm Cambridge Analytica accessed data from 50 million Facebook users during the 2016 US presidential campaign without the users' permission.
• Facebook suspended the firm from its platform on Friday, saying Cambridge Analytica lied about deleting the unauthorized information when it was first caught in 2015.
• President Donald Trump's campaign hired Cambridge to target voters and direct its political advertising strategy.

A data analysis firm linked to President Donald Trump's campaign used the personal information of 50 million people on Facebook without authorization to target them with personalized political advertisements, The Guardian reported Saturday.

The report comes just one day after Facebook suspended the firm, Cambridge Analytica, from buying ads or managing pages on the social media platform after discovering rules violations.

"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," Christopher Wylie, a former employee at Cambridge Analytica who helped the company obtain user data, told The Guardian. "That was the basis that the entire company was built on."

In 2014, Wylie reached out to Aleksandr Kogan, a Russian-American who was then a professor of psychology at the University of Cambridge in the UK. Kogan had developed a personality prediction app called "thisisyourdigitallife" that compiled personal information from people based on what they liked on Facebook.

Through his company, Global Science Research, Kogan and Cambridge Analytica paid roughly 270,000 people to download the app and take a personality test, per the Guardian report.

The demo helped Cambridge Analytica compile information not only from the users who took part in Kogan's research, but from their friends' profiles as well, exposing millions of users' data. Each person who downloaded the app only needed to have about 185 friends on Facebook for Cambridge to access the 50 million users.

Kogan's app compiled psychographic profiles of users that analyzed a variety of characteristics and personality traits, including openness, conscientiousness, agreeableness, IQ, gender, age, political views, and religion. It also evaluated people's "sensational interests," which were divided into five categories:

At the time, Kogan told Facebook he was collecting the information solely for academic purposes, but he did not reveal that his research would be handed over to Cambridge to use in political campaigns.

In a statement on Friday, Facebook said Kogan "lied to us and violated our Platform Policies by passing data from an app that was using Facebook Login to SCL/Cambridge Analytica, a firm that does political, government and military work around the globe."

Facebook reportedly first learned of Kogan's misuse of its data two years ago, but didn't disclose that fact to the public. At the time, the company removed Kogan's app from its platform and demanded that Kogan and Cambridge delete all of the data they had collected. All parties appeared to comply.

In fact, as recently as last month, Cambridge CEO Alexander Nix denied using data from Facebook and testified before a UK parliamentary committee that his firm did not have any of the data collected from Kogan's research.

But after reviewing the firm's internal emails and documents and interviewing former Cambridge employees, The New York Times found that most of the Facebook data was still in the firm's possession.

"This was a scam — and a fraud," Facebook vice president and deputy general counsel Paul Grewal told The Times. "We will take whatever steps are required to see that the data in question is deleted once and for all — and take action against all offending parties."

Facebook's statement about deleting Cambridge from its platform came late Friday night — hours before The Times broke its story on Saturday morning.

During the 2016 US presidential race, Cambridge performed a variety of tasks for the Trump campaign, including profiling voters, purchasing TV ads, and suggesting where Trump should travel to best appeal to voters, according to The Times.

Several news outlets reported in 2016 that the Trump campaign paid Cambridge Analytica $5 million for its services in September alone that year, a significant increase from the $250,000 it paid one month earlier.

But the extent to which the Trump campaign relied on the firm's work and whether its services helped Trump win aren't exactly clear.

Cambridge Analytica was founded in 2013. Shortly thereafter, prominent Trump supporter and American businessman Robert Mercer invested $15 million in the firm. Steve Bannon, Trump's former chief strategist, served as board member.

In addition to its involvement with the Trump team, Cambridge has also been involved with dozens of other political campaigns in the US and the UK, including the Brexit referendum and Sen. Ted Cruz's primary run in 2016.
Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey launches an investigation into alleged harvesting of Facebook profiles by Cambridge Analytica, a firm employed by Donald Trump's 2016 election campaign.