Facebook says EU data unlikely shared with Cambridge Analytica

Bloomberg

Facebook Inc said private data about its European users may not have fallen into the hands of Cambridge Analytica after all, as the social network continues to fend off criticism about a scandal that sparked global outrage.
“The best information we have suggests that no European user data was shared by Dr [Aleksandr] Kogan with Cambridge Analytica,” Stephen
Satterfield, a privacy policy director at Facebook, told European Union lawmakers at a hearing. Kogan is the researcher who collected users’ information and subsequently sold it to the consulting firm working on Donald Trump’s 2016 US presidential campaign.
Facebook said it wouldn’t be able to make any firm conclusions on the matter until it conducts its own audit, which it plans for after it gets the go-ahead from the UK’s privacy watchdog currently conducting its own probe. The social network said its preliminary conclusion is based on testimony by Kogan, as well as contracts that his company, GSR, had with Cambridge Analytica, along with its own internal analysis.
Explaining the evidence that led to the company’s conclusion, Richard Allan, Facebook’s vice president of policy solutions, said Kogan’s contract with Cambridge Analytica instructed the researcher to collect the data of Americans to use in US political
campaigns. While almost all of the people who installed Kogan’s app were Americans, Kogan may still have collected European data, Allan said.
“But the data he delivered to Cambridge Analytica were the Americans’ data because that’s all they wanted,” Allan said.
The US tech giant previously told the EU that the data of as many as 2.7 million Europeans might have been shared with Cambridge Analytica. The company has previously notified users whose data was potentially accessed by Kogan’s app — even if their data might not have been improperly shared with Cambridge Analytica.