Aleksandr Kogan, who teaches at Cambridge University, told a parliamentary committee that criticism of his work by Facebook showed the US social media giant was in “PR crisis mode”.
“I don’t believe they actually think these things because I think they realise that their platform has been mined left and right by thousands of others,” said the Russian-American scientist, who is now banned from Facebook.
“I was just the unlucky person that ended up somehow linked to the Trump campaign. It’s convenient to point the finger at a single entity,” he said, playing down his own work as of little political value.
Kogan created a personality prediction app through his company Global Science Research (GSR), which offered a small financial payment in return for users filling out a personality test.
Facebook says it was downloaded by 270,000 people, but it also gave Kogan access to their friends, giving him a wealth of information on 87mn users, according to the social media giant’s boss Mark Zuckerberg.
Cambridge Analytica went on to work on Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, using message micro-targeting through personality profiles.
However, Kogan told MPs yesterday that the data was too imprecise to build up accurate profiles that could be used to effectively target political Facebook ads.
“One of the biggest points of confusion has been how accurate the personality scores we provided to SCL (CA’s parent company) were,” he said. “The scores were highly inaccurate.
“We found that the scores were more accurate than a random guess, but less accurate than assuming everyone is average on every trait.”
Facebook’s own tools “provide companies a far more effective pathway to target people based on their personalities than using scores from users from our work,” he added.
Kogan said that CA assured him that what he was doing was “perfectly legal and within the terms of service” of the social media giant.
CA’s former chief executive Alexander Nix has denied using data collected by GSR, but Kogan called the claim “a fabrication”.
He also accused Facebook of feigning ignorance of how their users’ data was being used, saying it was “well documented that Facebook collaborates with researchers.
“They gave me the data set without any agreement signed,” he explained. “Sometime later they came and we did have a signed agreement.”
When asked why Facebook would be so accommodating, Kogan replied that “this was something they gave their employees to stimulate them.”