Ravi Shankar Prasad had informed Parliament in July 2018 that there will be a CBI probe into the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data theft case.
In the matter of alleged illegal harvesting of personal data of 5.62 lakh Indian Facebook users, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) has filed a case against UK-based political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica. Another company based out of that country, Global Science Research (GSRL), has also been named by the agency.
Multiple international media platforms, in 2018, quoting former Cambridge Analytica employees, associates, and documents to report that the firm had harvested private information from the Facebook profiles of over 50 million users the world over without their permission.
Ravi Shankar Prasad, the Union Minister of Electronics and Information Technology, had informed Parliament in July 2018 that there will be a CBI probe into the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data theft case.
The two firms were booked for criminal conspiracy and cyber crime after CBI’s preliminary enquiry revealed that criminal offences committed by Cambridge Analytica and GSRL.
GSRL illegally collected personal data of around 5.62 lakh users in India and shared it with Cambridge Analytica, Facebook had said in its response to the CBI’s queries. Allegations are that the consulting firm then used the data to influence elections in India.
GSRL Founder and Director Dr Alexander Kogan had created an app “thisisyourdigitallife”, the preliminary enquiry revealed.
According to Facebook’s policy, the app was authorised to collect specific user data for academic and research purposes. However, the app collected additional unauthorised data of users illegally, the CBI has found. Demographic information, pages liked, and contents on private chats were some of the details collected through the data without the knowledge and consent of the app users.
335 users in India had installed this app, according to Facebook. The data of approximately 5.62 lakh additional users, who were part of the friends’ network of the initial 335, had also been harvested illegally by the app, the social media giant has estimated.
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