Twitter reportedly sold data access to a researcher of Cambridge Analytica

A new report suggests that Facebook isn’t the only social media firm that is linked to Cambridge Analytica. After the recent Facebook data breach debacle, Twitter has also confirmed that it had sold public data access to a researcher Aleksandr Kogan's GSR, the firm whose quiz app collected data from millions of Facebook users without their consent.

Twitter has confirmed this selling of public data to Bloomberg, stating that the firm has granted access to large-scale public data, covering months of posts, for one day in 2015.

“In 2015, GSR did have one-time API access to a random sample of public tweets from a five-month period from December 2014 to April 2015,” Twitter said in a statement to Bloomberg. “Based on the recent reports, we conducted our own internal review and did not find any access to private data about people who use Twitter.”

However, there isn’t any knowledge on what Kogan and GSR exactly did with the information, but the short access window provided by the firm to them suggests that this might be more about studying the sentiment at a moment rather than using it to a targeted election campaign.

Social media firms have become noticeable all over since the Facebook’s data scandal. However, Twitter doesn’t have vast data access of its users similar to Facebook and henceforth this breach appears not to be a major privacy issue.

(Source)

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