Facebook is investigating one of its own employees with ties to Cambridge Analytica, the data-analysis firm that worked for President Donald Trump's 2016 campaign and was suspended by the social media giant over allegations that it held onto improperly obtained user data after saying it deleted the information, CNN reports.
A New York Times report on Saturday said Cambridge Analytica harvested private information from more than 50 million Facebook profiles for Trump’s campaign with the help of a Cambridge University researcher who built an app to do it.
The researcher, Aleksandr Kogan, told Facebook and app users that he was collecting information for academic purposes. Kogan was co-director for Global Science Research with current Facebook employee Joseph Chancellor.
"Joseph Chancellor is an employee of Facebook. We are looking into the situation," a spokesperson for Facebook told CNN.
Chancellor, a researcher at Cambridge University, left GSR in September 2015 according to UK government records, and was hired to work as a quantitative social psychologist at Facebook around November 2015.
Facebook said Kogan “gained access to this information in a legitimate way and through the proper channels” but “did not subsequently abide by our rules” because he passed the data on to third parties. Kogan says he had a “close working relationship” with Facebook and that he did nothing illegal.
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