Facebook Placed An Employee Who Harvested User Data For Cambridge Analytica On Leave

Ryan Mac, reporting for BuzzFeed News: A Facebook employee, who helped harvest and sell data from millions of users of the social network for political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica in a previous job, has quietly been placed on administrative leave by the Menlo Park, California-based company. Joseph Chancellor, a quantitative social psychologist for Facebook, has been on leave for a few weeks following revelations of his role in a data privacy scandal that has rocked the Silicon Valley giant, according to two sources familiar with the situation.

In March, it was revealed that Cambridge Analytica, a consulting company that did elections work for Republican presidential candidates Ted Cruz, Ben Carson, and Donald Trump, inappropriately obtained user data from a third-party app developer. That app company, Global Science Research (GSR), was founded by Chancellor and his research partner Aleksandr Kogan, and obtained Facebook user data on up to 87 million people.

Re:

[sycodon]

You know he did it with the complicity of upper management and even more likely, at their direction.

Something like that isn't something even a mid-level manager just does on their own.

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

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[sqorbit]

Normally I'm not one to complain about slashdot articles, because there is no point, but I have to agree. You're data wasn't safe on Facebook. Really? Thanks for that. It's not news, nor really all that interesting or uprising. There has to be better topics to vote up in the firehose.

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[angel'o'sphere]

It is a difference if Facebook, the company, does something with the data, they think you signed/agreed to for them to use, or if an employee is spying in your data and uses it for his own profit.
The first one is arguable legal, the later one is definitely illegal.

Re:

[Joe_Dragon]

or like paid leave for life to make it so they don't go to court and let all kind of stuff come out in discovery

They found the one guy!

[Kenja]

Just like they found the one (and only one) using their Facebook admin access to stalk women. Problem solved!

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[HornWumpus]

Nonsense.

Obama supporting uses gave information on _all_ their contacts to the campaign.

Violating TOS is not the same as stealing.

Facebook putting their fingers on the electoral scale is worse! I'll take 'Cambridge Analytics' over 'Facebook' anyday. But they are both privacy violating scumbags.

Re:

[Thruen]

False equivalencies destroy credibility for either side. You're not doing your party any favors.

And yet...

[the_skywise]

Facebook is STILL COLLECTING AND HARVESTING this data.
They promise that "non-permitted parties" will no longer be able to do this. But that doesn't mean that they've stopped doing this analysis nor that they will GIVE PERMISSION to companies/countries as they deem fit.

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[WillAffleckUW]

I think you mean they collect the data, process it into metadata, and store the metadata.

They don't really care about the actual data per se.

Job Description

[Lab Rat Jason]

The fact that they employ a "quantitative social psychologist" speaks volumes about the company. Suddenly the claim that their business model is merely to "sell ads" seems suspect.

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[ceoyoyo]

Selling ads is probably the biggest occupation of quantitative social psychologists.

Re:

[hey!]

While it does sound like bullshit, I wouldn't necessarily assume a social scientist, particularly a young one, doesn't have any IT skills.

This has to suck

[rsilvergun]

they guy was just doing his job. I hope it's paid leave. It's one thing if what he was told to do was obviously illegal, but it's not even a little illegal. Basically, it feels like tossing a little guy under the bus. Like a sacrificial lamb.

FACEDOT!

[Zorro]

Coming soon!

The actual details

[thePsychologist]

Actually, Zuckerberg gave this employee extra vacation time and a promotion.