Cambridge Analytica is in the news again as the Central Bureau of Investigation has booked the UK based firm along with Global Science Research Limited for collecting and harvesting unauthorised data of Indians from Facebook.
The FIR comes after two years of preliminary enquiries into the company’s involvement in India based on a complaint raised by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology.
The enquiry found that Cambridge Analytica had created an app called ‘thisisyourdigitallife’. This app was authorised to collect specific data of its users in Facebook.
According to the enquiry, 335 Indians had installed the app which then went on to illegally collect data of approximately 5.62 lakh Facebook friends.
Cambridge Analytica first came into the spotlight approximately three years ago when the company was accused of harvesting data on people from Facebook and then using it to sway election results in the US, more specifically, the 2016 elections and assisting the Donald Trump campaign.
Cambridge Analytica markets itself as providing consumer research, targeted advertising and other data-related services to both political and corporate clients.
The company’s corporate clients were not listed on its website, but describes them as including a daily newspaper that wanted to know more about its subscribers, a women's clothing brand that sought research on its customers and a US auto insurer interested in marketing itself.
Britain's Channel 4 News reported in 2018, based on secretly recorded video, that Cambridge Analytica secretly stage-managed Kenya President Uhuru Kenyatta's campaigns in the hotly contested 2013 and 2017 elections. Cambridge Analytica denied the report.
After Trump’s victory in the 2016 elections, Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix pitched his services to more clients boasting the company could develop psychological profiles of consumers and voters and could use it to sway them more effectively than traditional advertising.
The case has now been registered under IPC section 120(B), along with sections 66B, 85, 43(a) and 66 of IT Act 2000.
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