Facebook employs psychologist whose firm sold data to Cambridge Analytica

Source: The Guardian

March 18, 2018 at 22:03

Facebook’s campus on the edge of the San Francisco Bay in Menlo Park, California, where Joseph Chancellor currently works as a researcher. Photograph: Noah Berger/Reuters

Joseph Chancellor was co-director of GSR with Alexsandr Kogan
Data harvesting scheme called ‘scam’ and ‘fraud’ by Facebook

The co-director of a company that harvested data from tens of millions of Facebook users before selling it to the controversial data analytics firms Cambridge Analytica is currently working for the tech giant as an in-house psychologist.

Joseph Chancellor was one of two founding directors of Global Science Research (GSR), the company that harvested Facebook data using a personality app under the guise of academic research and later shared the data with Cambridge Analytica.

He was hired to work at Facebook as a quantitative social psychologist around November 2015, roughly two months after leaving GSR, which had by then acquired data on millions of Facebook users.

Chancellor is still working as a researcher at Facebook’s Menlo Park headquarters in California, where psychologists frequently conduct research and experiments using the company’s vast trove of data on more than 2 billion users.

It is not known how much Chancellor knew of the operation to harvest the data of more than 50 million Facebook users and pass their information on to the company that went on to run data analytics for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.

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