After the Cambridge Analytica scandal where the data of private accounts were leaked, another company comes up: Twitter. A new report revealed that the firm also sold their collected data.
After Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified before Congress about the misuse of data, questions about other social platforms have begun to emerge. As we know, Cambridge Analytica violated the privacy of users to manage the Donald Trump campaign, a globally condemned act.
In the case of Twitter, access to data would have been sold to an academic at the University of Cambridge, linked to Cambridge Analytica. The academic named Aleksandr Kogan, was one of those who obtained information from Facebook users (personality questionnaire) that later used Cambridge Analytica.
Aleksandr Kogan established his own commercial company, Global Science Research (GSR), and it was precisely to this firm that he was granted access to public Twitter data, covering months of publications. This was mentioned by Twitter in a statement rescued by Bloomberg :
In 2015, GSR had access (API) only once to a random sample of public tweets, which correspond to a period of five months: from December 2014 to April 2015. According to our reports, regarding an internal review, we did not find access to private data about people who use Twitter.
After selling the data package, the company also said that it eliminated Cambridge Analytica. He has not mentioned how much GSR paid him. In any case, Twitter mentioned that it does not sell private data of direct messages, so they would not have been compromised.
At the same time, following the Facebook scandal, lawmakers have asked Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey and Google CEO Sundar Pichai to testify about the implications of data leakage.
