place Facebook amid a web of links and contacts that may mean nothing, but have become part of a connect-the-dots exercise shared by everyone struggling to understand recent election events.
For example:
—While Kogan, a Cambridge University researcher born in Russia, was working with Cambridge Analytica, he was also an associate professor at St. Petersburg State University, and received grants from the Russian government to study social media, the Observer found. Cambridge Analytica also made a presentation on its techniques for micro-targeting social media users to Russian oil company Lukoil.
—Facebook recently told CNN that one of its researchers, Joseph Chancellor, was a director of Kogan’s company Global Science Research, which had cooperated with Cambridge Analytica. Facebook said it was looking into the issue.
—One or more employees of defense contractor Palantir Technologies, co-founded by Facebook board member and Trump supporter Peter Thiel, allegedly helped Cambridge Analytica conceive its strategy for mining Facebook profiles, The New York Times reported Tuesday.
Facebook’s stance is that it had no part in Cambridge Analytica’s use of member profiles to influence voters, and that the data firm and Kogan had flouted its limits on accessing user data.
But Andrew Keane Woods, an assistant professor at the University of Kentucky College of Law, says that Facebook could still be under an existential threat in the E.U. and elsewhere, by holding that it did nothing wrong by openly making it possible for app developers to extract personal information from the profiles of users and their friends while it offered users some options to refuse consent. Writing in a Lawfare blogpost March 20, (before Facebook made recent changes to its privacy settings) Woods said:
“If users and regulators decide that the firm did not do anything out of the ordinary—that this is just the way Facebook works—they may reasonably conclude that the firm itself is unacceptable.”
