Facebook suspended Alex SpectreKogan over allegations that he lied when he said the data would be used for research purposes only
In a video published online in September, a social scientist named Alex Spectre made an earnest pitch for his new startup. Clad in the Silicon Valley uniform of open-collar shirt and blazer, Spectre boasted that his company -- Philometrics -- would revolutionize the way online surveys were done, making it easier for companies to design questionnaires that people would actually respond to on Facebook,
Twitter or other sites. Crucially, he said, the surveys could predict the responses for large groups from a small number of respondents and micro-target ads better.
"The reality is working with big data, social media is incredibly difficult," said Spectre, who more commonly goes by Aleksandr Kogan, which he uses in his role as a Cambridge University researcher.
"You want to work with people who have a lot of experience. You want to connect with people who have been working with these massive data sets."
Kogan would know. On Friday, he was suspended by Facebook Inc. for his earlier work mining data
on what the New York Times reported was as many as 50 million Facebook users and sharing it with Cambridge Analytica, a political-advertising firm that helped Donald Trump win the 2016 US presidential election. Facebook suspended Kogan over allegations that he lied when he said the data would be used for research purposes only.
The social network suspended Cambridge Analytica as well.
The boyish-appearing Kogan has been thrown into the center of a scandal that has called into question not only the methods the Trump campaign used to psychoanalyze and target potential voters and win the presidency, but also the practices of Silicon Valley companies in allowing third parties to access and exploit private information.
Facebook has since disabled the feature that let Kogan amass personal data on millions of users when less than 1 percent of those people even downloaded his app. But the episode offers a glimpse into how promiscuous some internet giants actually are with information that many users assume is always kept secret. Government officials in the U. S. and Europe are calling for Facebook Chief
Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg to appear in front of lawmakers, and the demands for answers may foreshadow tougher regulation for the social network.
Kogan didn’t respond to multiple attempts to reach him for comment. His ill-fated detour from the academic track into the darker corners of social media marketing began in 2014 when U. K.-based Cambridge Analytica turned to Kogan for help.
The firm was interested in a data project Kogan had worked on at Cambridge University that was based on research into personality traits and social media.
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