Professor who helped Cambridge Analytica harvest data says ‘he never heard a word’ of objection from Facebook

'I think that the core idea we had – that everybody knows and nobody cares – was wrong'

Alexander Kogan started working for the company in June 2014 (CBS News/60 Minutes)

Alexander Kogan, the academic who was hired by Cambridge Analytica to harvest information from tens of millions of Facebook profiles, defended his role in the data collection, saying he was upfront about how the information would be used and that he “never heard a word” of objection from the social media site.

The psychology professor who has found himself cast as the villain by both Cambridge Analytica and Facebook, expressed regret for his role in the data mining, which took place in 2014.

“Back then, we thought it was fine. Right now my opinion has really been changed,” professor Kogan said.

“I think that the core idea we had – that everybody knows and nobody cares – was wrong,” he said. “For that, I am sincerely sorry.”

Since the full scope of Cambridge Analytica’s data collection was revealed last month by The New York Times, both Facebook and Cambridge Analytica, a political consultancy firm, have been under intense scrutiny and eager to shift the blame to professor Kogan.

They have said that he misled them about how the information was being collected and what it was being used for. Facebook has even banned professor Kogan from the social network and deleted his profile.

But in his first extensive interview since the report in The New York Times, professor Kogan insisted that he was upfront about the Facebook app used to harvest the data and that no one seemed to care.

“The belief in Silicon Valley and certainly our belief at that point was that the general public must be aware that their data is being sold and shared and used to advertise to them,” professor Kogan said in an interview with 60 Minutes.

Founded by Stephen Bannon and Robert Mercer, a wealthy Republican donor, Cambridge Analytica rose to prominence for its work with president Donald Trump’s campaign in the 2016 election. The company claimed it had developed analytical tools that could identify the personalities of US voters and influence their behaviour – and that Facebook data had been used to help create so-called psychographic modelling techniques.

The techniques have been widely questioned by academics and other political data firms, while Cambridge Analytica has since insisted that the Facebook data was not used in its work in the 2016 campaign.

Professor Kogan was hired on a contract by Cambridge Analytica in June 2014 – the same month the company was founded – and harvested the data throughout the summer by asking Facebook users to take a lengthy personality questionnaire.

The questionnaire was not actually on Facebook. It was hosted by a company called Qualtrics, which provided a platform for online surveys. Respondents were asked to authorise access to their Facebook profiles and when they did, an app built by professor Kogan performed its sole function: harvesting the data of users and all of their Facebook friends. Their names, birth dates and location data, as well as lists of every Facebook page they had ever liked, were downloaded without their knowledge or express consent.

Facebook has said that those who took the quiz were told that their data would be used only for academic purposes, claiming that it and its users were misled by Cambridge Analytica and professor Kogan. Cambridge Analytica has said it was told that professor Kogan’s app complied with Facebook’s own rules.

But The New York Times reported last month that the fine print accompanying professor Kogan’s questionnaire told Facebook users that their data could be used for commercial purposes. That was an outright violation of Facebook’s rules at the time, but the company did nothing to stop professor Kogan’s app from collecting the data.

“This is the frustrating bit, where Facebook clearly has never cared. I mean, it’s never enforced this agreement,” professor Kogan told 60 Minutes. “I had a terms of service that was up there for a year and a half that said I could transfer and sell the data."

He added: “Never heard a word”.

Until April 2015, Facebook allowed app developers to collect some private information from the profiles of users who downloaded apps and from those of their friends. Facebook has said it allowed this kind of data collection to help developers improve the “in-app” experience for users.

Facebook even worked with professor Kogan. In November 2015, it brought him in as a consultant to explain the technique he had used for Cambridge Analytica, which focused on how the Facebook pages that users had liked could reveal aspects of their personalities.

“At the time, I thought we were doing everything that was correct,” professor Kogan told 60 Minutes.

“If I had any inkling that what I was going to do was going to destroy my relationship with Facebook, I would never have done it,” he said.

The New York Times