In a testimony today with a UK committee investigating the misuse of Facebook users’ personal data, Brittany Kaiser, a former Cambridge Analytica employee, claimed in her spoken and written testimony that the firm used other quizzes, such as the “‘sex compass’ quiz,” to gather additional user data.
Kaiser did not provide any information on the specific quizzes that Cambridge Analytica used, but according to her statement, it’s clear that “This Is Your Digital Life” is not the only quiz that firm was using to gather Facebook users’ data. She also claims that the firm was not up front with Facebook in regard to the data it did have. She notes that Cambridge Analytica data scientists appeared to have been using Facebook two months after the company told Facebook that the data in question was already deleted.
Per TechCrunch, in her spoken testimony, Kaiser said, “In my pitches I used to give examples even to clients that if you go on Facebook and you see these viral personality quizzes — not all of them would have been designed by Cambridge Analytica/SCL Group or our affiliates but that these applications were designed specifically to harvest data from individuals, using Facebook as the tool.”
Facebook has made it very clear that they’re going through any and all apps that have access to large amounts of data, and evaluating them on how they’re gathering and using it. The social giant has already suspended a few firms such as AggregateIQ, that have used quizzes to collect and store data. “We are currently investigating all apps that had access to large amounts of information before we changed our platform to dramatically reduce data access in 2014,” a Facebook spokesperson told The Jolt Journal. “We will conduct a full audit of any app with suspicious activity. And if we find developers that misused personally identifiable information, we will ban them and tell everyone affected.”
“It’s widely known that like other marketing agencies we sometimes collect personality data using a research panel with an appropriate statement of consent,” Cambridge Analytica said in a statement to The Jolt Journal. “These surveys are entirely unconnected to the GSR/Kogan data for 30 million users that we lawfully licensed in 2014 and then deleted when Facebook asked us to do so.”
