I am being used as scapegoat - academic who mined Facebook data

Extract from The Guardian

Cambridge Analytica

Cambridge University researcher Aleksandr Kogan says he is being unfairly blamed by Facebook and Cambridge Analytica

Matthew Weaver

Wed 21 Mar 2018 19.12 AEDT Last modified on Wed 21 Mar 2018 19.26 AEDT

Kogan harvested the personal details of 50 million Facebook users via a personality app. Photograph: Kogan

The academic at the centre of Facebook’s data breach claims he has been made a scapegoat by the social network and Cambridge Analytica, the firm that acquired the information.

Aleksandr Kogan, a Moldovan-born researcher from Cambridge University, harvested the personal details of 50 million Facebook users via a personality app he developed.
Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Christopher Wylie told the Observer that the data Kogan obtained was used to influence the outcome of the US presidential election, a charge the firm denies.

 Cambridge Analytica whistleblower: 'We spent $1m harvesting millions of Facebook profiles' – video

Kogan told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that he was being unfairly blamed for the scandal.

He said: “My view is that I’m being basically used as a scapegoat by both Facebook and Cambridge Analytica. Honestly we thought we were acting perfectly appropriately. We thought we were doing something that was really normal.”
Kogan also disputed Cambridge Analytica’s claim that he had approached them. The personality test app was the firm’s idea, not his, he said. He pointed out that it paid up to $800,000 to recruit people to use it.
Kogan said he was told that the scheme was legal but accepts he should have questioned the ethics of the exercise.
Cambridge Analytica denies using the Facebook data during the Trump campaign. Facebook insists that Kogan broke its rules, by transferring data to a third party for commercial purposes.

Kogan set up Global Science Research (GSR) to carry out Cambridge Analytica’s data research. While at Cambridge he accepted a position at St Petersburg State University, and also took Russian government grants for research.
Kogan assembled the information through an app on the site. It collected details of Americans who were paid to take a personality test, but also gathered data on those people’s Facebook friends.
Wylie claims most of this personal information had been taken without authorisation. He said Cambridge Analytica used it to build a powerful software program to predict and influence choices at the ballot box.
Cambridge Analytica’s chief executive, Alexander Nix, who was suspended on Tuesday, told MPs in February that his company did not use Facebook data in its work.

In a statement published on Saturday, the company denied any wrongdoing and said it did not harvest Facebook data, and none was used in the 2016 presidential election. It said it fully complied with Facebook’s terms of service and it had deleted all the data it received from GSR.