Finally Cambridge Analytica is Closing down
Cambridge Analytica, the data-processing firm that is at the centre of controversy involving Facebook data sharing is finally closing down.
Cambridge Analytica, the data-processing firm that is at the centre of controversy involving Facebook data sharing is finally closing down. The company has been sealed since the scandal involving the firm where it is accused of sharing the personal data of more than 50 million Facebook users illegally. Though Cambridge Analytica has never accepted any wrongdoing on its part and has shown the reason of it’s closing as the negative media coverage has done huge harm to it, thereby the company is now without any client.
According to the statement issued by Cambridge Analytica, “despite Cambridge Analytica’s unwavering confidence that its employees have acted ethically and lawfully, the siege of media coverage has driven away virtually all of the Company’s customers and suppliers. As a result, it has been determined that it is no longer viable to continue operating the business, which left Cambridge Analytica with no realistic alternative to placing the company into administration.”
According to reports from various cities, the company has also started winding up its centers in the US and UK. At its New York offices on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue, the office is closed and there is no staff working.
Alexander Nix, the CEO of Cambridge Analytica was suspended last month after a secret recording of his surfaced, in which he claimed to have worked for the election campaign of present US President Donald Trump. He also revealed in the secret recording that Cambridge Analytica used a self-destruct email server to erase its digital history.
But if some suspicious reports are to be believed, though it is shown that the Cambridge Analytica is dead, the team behind the company has already started a new company called Emerdata. Even the suspended CEO Alexander Nix is listed as a director along with other executives from SCL Group.
The scandal centres around the data collected from Facebook users via a personality app developed by a researcher of Cambridge University named Aleksandr Kogan. Through the app, Kogan was able to pull data from the Facebook users, their friends including their activities, location and all the information they shared on the world's largest social networking platform. Kogan then passed the data to Cambridge Analytica, which is a breach of Facebook’s platform policies.
Christopher Wylie, the whistleblower has time and again said, that the data Kogan collected was used to influence the outcome of the US presidential election and the firm has worked for Donald Trump during his election campaign.
Meanwhile, Facebook has apologized a number of times for the data breach. In a post recently Mark Zuckerberg has said, “This was a breach of trust between Kogan, Cambridge Analytica and Facebook, it was also a breach of trust between Facebook and the people who share their data with us and expect us to protect it. We need to fix that.”
When Facebook first discovered that a researcher of Cambridge University named Aleksandr Kogan had shared its users' data with Cambridge Analytica. It asked Cambridge Analytica to delete the data and also revoked Kogan’s apps’ API access. But Cambridge Analytica was silent and it was later revealed to Facebook that the data hadn’t been deleted, Facebook then banned Cambridge Analytica’s access to the social networking platform and launched an internal investigation of apps that has such access to the users' profile. Accordingly, Facebook made several changes to restrict third-party developers from accessing data from its user profiles.