The data was collected through an app called thisisyourdigitallife, built by Cambridge University academic Aleksandr Kogan through his company Global Science Research in collaboration with Cambridge Analytica. Following Facebook’s announcement of the 87m figure, Cambridge Analytica published a blog post stating that it had licensed data for “no more than 30m people from GSR” and “did not receive more data than this”. Play Video 2:05 How Cambridge Analytica ​tried to intimidate Nigerian voters – video reportFacebook first discovered that Kogan had improperly shared the information with Cambridge Analytica when a Guardian journalist contacted the company about it at the end of 2015. At the time Facebook asked Cambridge Analytica to delete the data and revoked Kogan’s access to the Facebook API, the interface through which third parties interact with the social network. After the Observer contacted Facebook three weeks ago with testimony from a whistleblower stating that Cambridge Analytica had not deleted the data, Facebook has announced a series of measures to prevent future data leaks.

Source: The Guardian April 04, 2018 19:03 UTC