Academic who collected 50 million Facebook profiles: ‘We thought we were doing something normal’


The academic at the heart of the Facebook data scandal has said he is being used as a scapegoat by the US tech giant. Aleksandr Kogan, a researcher at Cambridge University, collected a dataset of some 50 million Facebook users four years ago using a personality quiz app. Kogan later passed this information on to voter-profiling firm Cambridge Analytica, which claimed (but now denies) that it used the data to craft political ads for President Trump’s 2016 election.

Kogan’s comments, made to BBC Radio 4’s Today program, describe an environment of permissive data-gathering and lax privacy policies. “We thought we were acting perfectly appropriately. We thought we were doing something that was really normal,” Kogan said. “My view is that...

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