Mubasher: A member of the UK parliament claimed that the Facebook data gathered by Cambridge Analytica (CA) was accessed from Russia, according to reports.
The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) found evidence that Russia and other countries accessed data touching 87 million Facebook users, which were the focus of CA’s scandal, Conservative Member of Parliament Damian Collins, who is conducting a parliamentary inquiry into fake news, told CNN on Tuesday.
Collins also questioned whether “the Russians [indirectly] learned from CA, and used that knowledge to run ads in America during the presidential election as well.”
He emphasised the need to establish the identity of those who reached such data, what sort of access did they have “and were they actually able to take some of that data themselves and use it for whatever things they wanted.”
The ICO said last week that it proposed to launch criminal proceedings against SCL Elections, a representative of CA’s parent company which was claimed to have remotely used the server to access the data from Russia.
The ICO alleged that an estimated 87 million users have had their data harvested.
Aleksandr Kogan, a professor at the University of Cambridge and previously at St Petersburg State University, handed information to CA and others after starting a Facebook application called 'thisisourdigitallife'.
This information was used to target voters in the US during Donald Trump’s presidential elections campaign in 2016, while a whistleblower alleged that the UK firm has to campaigners for the UK’s exit from the European Union (EU), known as the Brexit.
“I [did not] know what could have happened to the data once I handed it over to Cambridge Analytica so it is difficult for me to speculate,” Kogan told CNN, as he denied providing any Russian entity access to Facebook data.
It is worth noting that CA shut down as a company this year, following allegations that the UK political consultancy had gathered information from millions of voters from their Facebook profiles and misused it.
