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| Alexander Nix, seen in a 2018 photo taken in London, was CEO of Cambridge Analytica, a consulting firm that US officials say deceived Facebook users when it harvested data for voter profiles (AFP Photo/Tolga AKMEN) |
Washington (AFP) - US regulators concluded Friday that British consultancy Cambridge Analytica -- at the center of a massive scandal on hijacking of Facebook data -- deceived users of the social network about how it collected and handled their personal information.
The Federal
Trade Commission said its investigation launched in March 2018 concluded that
the now-defunct political consulting firm "engaged in deceptive practices
to harvest personal information from tens of millions of Facebook users for
voter profiling and targeting."
The FTC
said the British firm, which worked on Donald Trump's 2016 presidential
campaign, made "false and misleading" claims when it offered Facebook
users a "personality quiz" -- stating it would not download names or
any personally identifiable information.
The case
created a firestorm over data protection when it was disclosed that Cambridge
Analytica was able to create psychological profiles using data from millions of
Facebook users through the harvesting of the data.
The
personality prediction app was downloaded by 270,000 people but also scooped up
data from their friends, and fed into an effort by the firm to predict the
behavior of individual US voters.
It was not
immediately clear what impact the FTC findings would have.
The FTC
issued an order which prohibits Cambridge Analytica -- which closed in 2018 --
from making false misrepresentations on how it handles personal data, and
requires compliance with a US-EU privacy agreement.
The FTC
reached a settlement earlier this year with Cambridge Analytica's former CEO
Alexander Nix and app developer Aleksandr Kogan that requires them to delete or
destroy any personal information they collected.
The company
claimed in 2018 it had been ruined by "numerous unfounded
accusations" that made it impossible to keep the business afloat.
Facebook's
own investigation found that some data from 87 million users in the US and
elsewhere had been compromised by the firm, and claimed the practices violated
the social network's terms of service.
Facebook,
which did not immediately respond to a query on the FTC decision, paid a record
$5 billion penalty early this year in a settlement with the regulator over
mishandling users' private data.
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