Cambridge Analytica has commissioned a third-party audit
It will confirm whether the 50 million-user data set the company acquired in 2015 is gone.
Mark Zuckerberg might be sorry that 50 million Facebook users' data ended up with the political firm Cambridge Analytica and will (at some point) head to Congress to explain what happened. The firm maintained that it deleted that information when Facebook requested it do so back in 2015, but it's unclear if that actually happened. Now Cambridge Analytica claims it's undertaking a third-party audit to verify that the data is gone.
The firm has been on damage control in the last few days, suspending its CEO Alexander Nix after an undercover video caught him claiming he could commit potential bribery and entrapment on clients' behalf. Evidence also emerged of him and other executives claiming they were responsible for Trump's "narrow victory" of winning votes in three states. The acting CEO Alexander Tayler published an open letter today announcing the third-party audit. He also repeated that the firm deleted the users' data at Facebook's insistence shortly after he joined the company as Chief Data Officer in late 2015. He reiterated that the company didn't use the 50 million-user data set in its analytical work for the Trump campaign in 2016.
Further, Tayler revealed that the company is looking into rumors that its ventures into politics outside the US were unethical. "We take the disturbing recent allegations of unethical practices in our non-US political business very seriously. The Board has launched a full and independent investigation into SCL Elections' past practices, and its findings will be shared publicly," Tayler wrote.
