Cambridge Analytica researcher Alex Kogan suggested Monday that it’s unreasonable for Facebook to claim it had been blindsided by the harvesting of users’ information, as the process was merely an “open secret” among tech giants.
Kogan, who was the data scientist behind the collecting and selling of user information to Cambridge Analytica, told NBC’s “Today” that to harvest such private information from users was “business as usual.”
“I think what folks need to understand is this was business as usual as far as Facebook developers went,” said Kogan, who claims to have been vilified by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in his testimony last week to Congress over the company’s privacy scandal.
“I think they’re trying to distract people from realizing that what we did was the normal practice back then… A lot of other developers collected way more data.” Cambridge Analytica researcher Alex Kogan in response to Facebook calling him a fraud and liar pic.twitter.com/ojHcdtI0o6
— TODAY (@TODAYshow) April 23, 2018
According to NBC News, a quiz created by Kogan allegedly harvested the information of 87 million Facebook users and was then passed on to Cambridge Analytica, a data firm later hired by Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.
“The reality is probably every user, or nearly every user, has been collected many, many times by many companies, and Facebook has no accounting for where that data is today.” -Cambridge Analytica researcher Alex Kogan pic.twitter.com/fUrkEU0Uo9
— TODAY (@TODAYshow) April 23, 2018
“They’re trying to distract people from realizing that what we did was the normal practice back then,” Kogan said. “A lot of other developers collected way more data.” – READ MORE