Facebook gave data on 'every friendship formed in 2011' to academic Aleksandr Kogan, study says

Cambridge researcher Aleksandr Kogan conducted a study on international friendships in 2015
Ella Wills22 March 2018

Facebook provided data on "every friendship formed in 2011" to Aleksandr Kogan, the University of Cambridge academic at the centre of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, according to a study.

The social media giant provided a dataset of “every friendship formed in 2011 in every country in the world at the national aggregate level” to Dr Kogan's University of Cambridge laboratory for a study on international friendships published in Personality and Individual Differences in 2015.

Facebook suspended the Cambridge academic last week for sharing data he gathered separately and passed on to data firm Cambridge Analytica, which is not linked with the university.

All information in the dataset was anonymous, the study said. A spokeswoman for Facebook confirmed this to The Guardian.

Two researchers from Facebook were named among the co-authors of the study, alongside academics from the University of California and Harvard Business School.

Dr Kogan was publishing under the name Aleksandr Spectre at the time.

The study was hailed in a 2015 press release by the University of Cambridge as the first output of ongoing collaborations between Dr Kogan's lab and Facebook.

A spokeswoman from Facebook told The Guardian: "The data that was shared was literally numbers."

She added: “There was no personally identifiable information included in this data.”

It comes as Facebook's founder Mark Zuckerberg apologised for a "major breach of trust" and admitted the social network made mistakes on Wednesday.

He has also been called upon to come before a committee of MPs to explain Facebook's data protection procedures.

Mr Zuckerberg also announced plans to protect users' data in the future on Wednesday, including investigating all apps that had access to "large amounts of data before 2014 policy changes".

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