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Twitter Accused Of Selling User Data To Aleksandr Kogan

twitter sold data to researcher

Since the Cambridge Analytica and Facebook scandal came forward, the users on social media are very cautious of the details which they are sharing on their social media accounts. Recently, another news came in that Twitter has also given its user’s data to the Cambridge Analytica researcher, Aleksandr Kogan. Dr. Kogan was able to get one-time API access to a sample of random public tweets which lasted more than five months from December 2014 to April 2015. Kogan is the same researcher who created the Facebook personality profiles for Cambridge Analytica.

It is not confirmed that data was used unethically or not. Dr. Kogan has stated that the data was used only for building “brand reports” and “survey extender tools” while maintaining the Twitter’s policies. Meanwhile, Cambridge Analytica has also stated that the data which Kogan took from Twitter was never used by Cambridge Analytica.

Twitter allows large enterprises and companies to access data which is used during specific events to analyze public sentiments. Last month, it was also brought forward that Facebook allowed Cambridge Analytica to access the data of as many as 87 million users, to design a political campaign. Since the news came, Facebook has faced a lot of reaction from the users. Whatsapp co-founder also left Facebook because of privacy issues.

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