After the Facebook-Cambridge analytica scandal blew off, people are finding it harder to trust social media services. Cambridge analytica a British political consulting firm improperly accessed data of 87 million Facebook users. The scandal has revealed a lot of secrets since then following the firm’s plan to launch its own cryptocurrency. But after all these controversies, the question still remains: Did Dr Aleksandr Kogan gain access data from any other sources? Twitter has confirmed on Saturday that GSR, which is Kogan’s own company purchased an API from the company.
The API access was one-time which allowed a random sample of public tweets from December 2014 to April 2015. Following the news, Twitter even conducted an internal review and found that GSR did not access any private data about Twitter users. Twitter actually grants access to some APIs to large organizations. This is mainly for the purpose of surveying sentiment or opinion during various events.
A Twitter spokesperson told Telegraph:
Twitter has also made the policy decision to off-board advertising from all accounts owned and operated by Cambridge Analytica. This decision is based on our determination that Cambridge Analytica operates using a business model that inherently conflicts with acceptable Twitter Ads business practices. Cambridge Analytica may remain an organic user on our platform, in accordance with the Twitter Rules.
According to a Cambridge analytica Spokesperson: The company used The platform for advertising. He added, “the company had never undertaken a project with GSR focusing on Twitter data. And Cambridge Analytica has never received Twitter data from GSR.”
However, this is not as big as the Facebook Scandal. Moreover, Twitter doesn’t store much of their user’s personal data. In terms of gaining information about Users, the platform seems a much safer platform. But this shows the Cambridge Analytica research and data collection was big!
You can follow up on the Facebook Data leak scandal here!
