Peter Thiel Employee Helped Cambridge Analytica Before It Harvested Data

[highplainsdem]

Source: NYT

As a start-up called Cambridge Analytica sought to harvest the Facebook data of tens of millions of Americans in summer 2014, the company received help from at least one employee at Palantir Technologies, a top Silicon Valley contractor to American spy agencies and the Pentagon.

It was a Palantir employee in London, working closely with the data scientists building Cambridge’s psychological profiling technology, who suggested the scientists create their own app — a mobile-phone-based personality quiz — to gain access to Facebook users’ friend networks, according to documents obtained by The New York Times.

Cambridge ultimately took a similar approach. By early summer, the company found a university researcher to harvest data using a personality questionnaire and Facebook app. The researcher scraped private data from over 50 million Facebook users — and Cambridge Analytica went into business selling so-called psychometric profiles of American voters, setting itself on a collision course with regulators and lawmakers in the United States and Britain.

The revelations pulled Palantir — co-founded by the wealthy libertarian Peter Thiel — into the furor surrounding Cambridge, which improperly obtained Facebook data to build analytical tools it deployed on behalf of Donald J. Trump and other Republican candidates in 2016. Mr. Thiel, a supporter of President Trump, serves on the board at Facebook.

-snip-

Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/27/us/cambridge-analytica-palantir.html

---

Palantir is claiming just the one employee did this, acting in "an entirely personal capacity."

Whistleblower Christopher Wylie said there were multiple senior Palantir employees working on this.

[Wellstone ruled]

1. Understand this Guy is now a New Zeland citizen.

[BigmanPigman]

2. I believe Wylie. His testimony is pretty condemning.

Palantir, a secretive company co-founded by billionaire Peter Thiel, worked with Cambridge Analytica, the political analysis firm that harvested data from Facebook users, whistle blower Christopher Wylie told U.K. lawmakers Tuesday.
"That was not an official contract between Palantir and Cambridge Analytica, but there were Palantir staff that would come into the office and work on that data," Wylie told lawmakers. He added that Palantir staff "helped build the models we were working on."
Wylie did not elaborate on the "models" being worked on but it relates to Cambridge Analytica's algorithms used to target people in political votes."

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/27/palantir-worked-with-cambridge-analytica-on-the-facebook-data-whistleblower.html

[neohippie]

3. Time to look into this further too

Facebook isn't being completely honest here.

It appears that they worked with Kogan on other projects that involved massive amounts of user data. This included Facebook giving Kogan access to data on more than 57 Billion Facebook friendships around the globe.


https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/facebook-had-a-closer-relationship-than-it-disclosed-with-the-academic-it-called-a-liar/2018/03/22/ca0570cc-2df9-11e8-8688-e053ba58f1e4_story.html?utm_term=.e62c508fa0d0

The methodology of the study has similarities to the collection methods used when Kogan worked with Cambridge Analytica, and it also makes reference to an app built by Kogan. To conduct the study, the researchers recruited freelance workers on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk crowdsourced labor program and paid them $1 each to participate. Of that group, 857 participants authorized Kogan to gather some information from their Facebook profiles automatically, the study said.

The authors obtained the friend networks of those participants, calculating the current location and the percentage who lived outside the United States. Facebook then provided the authors with data “on every friendship formed in 2011 in every country in the world at the national aggregate level.” The data set, which was anonymized, included a total of 57,457,192,520 friendships, according to the paper.

I think somebody needs to keep digging deeper here too

[neohippie]

5. Just found this story too

Alexander Kogan worked on dark personality project in Russia with similarities in using Facebook app for data collection


https://www.reuters.com/article/us-facebook-cambridge-analytica-kogan/academic-in-facebook-storm-worked-on-russian-dark-personality-project-idUSKBN1GX2F6

Aleksandr Kogan advised a team at St Petersburg State University that was exploring whether psychopathy, narcissism and machiavellianism - dubbed the ‘dark triad’ by psychologists - were linked to abusive online behavior, said Yanina Ledovaya, senior lecturer at the university’s department of psychology.

“We wanted to detect (internet) trolls in order to improve in some way the lives of people suffering from trolling,” Ledovaya told Reuters.

[BumRushDaShow]

4. Bingo! The "U.S." connection

Cambridge Analytica = Britain
AIQ = Canada

And now -
Palantir = U.S.
GSR = Britain

I knew there had to be someone here in the U.S. (outside of Facebook itself) who was involved.

There is this in the OP article -

In his testimony, Mr. Wylie acknowledged that Palantir and Cambridge Analytica never signed a contract or entered into a formal business relationship. But he said some Palantir employees helped engineer Cambridge’s psychographic models.

“There were Palantir staff who would come into the office and work on the data,” Mr. Wylie told lawmakers. “And we would go and meet with Palantir staff at Palantir.” He did not provide an exact number for the employees or identify them.

Palantir employees were impressed with Cambridge’s backing from Mr. Mercer, one of the world’s richest men, according to messages viewed by The Times. And Cambridge Analytica viewed Palantir’s Silicon Valley ties as a valuable resource for launching and expanding its own business.

<...>

Those negotiations failed. But Mr. Wylie struck gold with another Cambridge researcher, the Russian-American psychologist Aleksandr Kogan, who built his own personality quiz app for Facebook. Over subsequent months, Dr. Kogan’s work helped Cambridge develop psychological profiles of millions of American voters.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/27/us/cambridge-analytica-palantir.html

AND this article spells out the potential Google connection via now-former Google CEO Eric Schmidt's daughter -

Emails link Peter Thiel's Palantir and Eric Schmidt's daughter to Facebook's Cambridge Analytica fiasco
Jim Edwards

LONDON — Peter Thiel's data-mining company Palantir and former Google chairman Eric Schmidt's daughter both had connections to Cambridge Analytica's (CA) misuse of Facebook user information, according to documents seen by The New York Times.

"We learned today that an employee, in 2013-2014, engaged in an entirely personal capacity with people associated with Cambridge Analytica," Palantir told the Times. "We are looking into this and will take the appropriate action." Sophie Schmidt did not respond to the paper's request for comment.

The employee was Alfredas Chmieliauskas, according to the Times. His LinkedIn shows that he is a business development staffer at Palantir in London. He suggested that CA create the personality quiz app that harvested the data of about 50 million Facebook users, documents seen by the Times said. The connection between Palantir and CA was apparently brokered by Schmidt's daughter. Sophie Schmidt had been an intern at SCL Group, a UK-based defence and intelligence contractor that created Cambridge Analytica in 2012. She suggested that SCL work with Palantir, according to a 2013 email seen by the Times:

"Ever come across Palantir. Amusingly Eric Schmidt's daughter was an intern with us and is trying to push us towards them?" one SCL employee wrote to a colleague in the email.

http://www.businessinsider.com/emails-peter-thiel-palantir-facebook-cambridge-analytica-2018-3

Plus this has bubbled up -

Cambridge Analytica Contradicts Facebook Line on Data Deletion as Scandal Widens
By Martin Baccardax
Mar 27, 2018 8:07 AM EDT

Cambridge Analytica, the U.K. political consultancy at the heart of Facebook Inc.'s (FB) data scandal, said Tuesday that it can verify the deletion of information it purchased from a University researcher, contradicting public statements from the social media giant's COO Sheryl Sandberg.

London-based Cambridge Analytica also said in a series of Tweets from its verified account that it took legal action to stop whistleblower Christopher Wylie, who is testifying before U.K. lawmakers as part of a probe into the evolving scandal, from "pitching identical services to our clients" when he left the first in 2014. The statements come amid increasing concern that data obtained by Cambridge Analytica may have been used to sway not only the 2016 U.S. Presidential elections, but also Britain's EU referendum earlier that year.

"CA deleted all data received from GSR," the company said, referencing Global Science Research, the firm used by Cambridge University academic Aleksandr Kogan. "We worked with (Facebook) over this period to ensure that they were satisfied that we had not knowingly breached any of FB's terms of service and also provided a signed statement to confirm that all FB data and their derivatives had been deleted."

It was far from a $1M project. We paid $500K for the GSR data. Once Facebook told us it breached their terms, we deleted the data and we pursued GSR for damages.
— Cambridge Analytica (@CamAnalytica) March 27, 2018

https://www.thestreet.com/story/14535541/1/cambridge-analytica-contradicts-facebook-line-on-data-deletion-as-scandal-widens.html