Twitter embroiled in Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal

Social media firm admits granting
researcher ‘one-time’ access to tweets but denies wrongdoing

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Aleksandr Kogan, who created a personality quiz used by
Cambridge Analytica to gather information on Facebook users, was
also granted access to “large-scale public Twitter data, covering
months of posts, for one day in 2015”, Bloomberg reports.

In a statement to the news site, Twitter said Kogan’s commercial
enterprise, Global Science Research (GSR), had been given
“one-time” access to “a random sample of public tweets from a
five-month period from December 2014 to April 2015.” 

“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”, added the social media site,
which charges firms to collect tweets “en
masse”. 

“At first glance, this doesn’t appear to be a major
privacy issue, since tweets and Twitter profiles don’t
share much about you outside of what you wrote”, says
Engadget.

The relatively short period for which GSR had access to the data
also suggests it hadn’t been “venturing outside the official
boundaries” as it did with Facebook, the tech site says.

For Facebook, GSR developed an app called “This is your digital
life” in order to harvest the personal information of those using
the social media platform, which it later sold to Cambridge
Analytica.

However, Kogan has “insisted” that the data it gathered from
Twitter had only been used to build “brand reports” and “survey
extender tools”, which is in line with the social media
firm’s policies, The Daily Telegraph reports.