Facebook employs psychologist whose firm sold data to Cambridge Analytica

"The co-director of a company that harvested data from tens of millions of Facebook users before selling it to the controversial data analytics firms Cambridge Analytica is currently working for the tech giant as an in-house psychologist.

Joseph Chancellor was one of two founding directors of Global Science Research (GSR), the company that harvested Facebook data using a personality app under the guise of academic research and later shared the data with Cambridge Analytica.

He was hired to work at Facebook as a quantitative social psychologist around November 2015, roughly two months after leaving GSR, which had by then acquired data on millions of Facebook users.

Chancellor is still working as a researcher at Facebook’s Menlo Park headquarters in California, where psychologists frequently conduct research and experiments using the company’s vast trove of data on more than 2 billion users.

It is not known how much Chancellor knew of the operation to harvest the data of more than 50 million Facebook users and pass their information on to the company that went on to run data analytics for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.

Chancellor was a director of GSR along with Aleksandr Kogan, a more senior Cambridge University psychologist who is said to have devised the scheme to harvest Facebook data from people who used a personality app that was ostensibly acquiring data for academic research.

On Friday, Facebook announced it had suspended both Kogan and Cambridge Analytica from using the platform, pending an investigation.

Facebook said in a statement Kogan “gained access to this information in a legitimate way and through the proper channels” but “did not subsequently abide by our rules” because he passed the information on to third parties. Kogan maintains that he did nothing illegal and had a “close working relationship” with Facebook.

Facebook appears to have taken no action against Chancellor – Kogan’s business partner at the time their company acquired the data, using an app called thisisyourdigitallife.

Cambridge Analytica – a company owned by the hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, and headed at the time by Trump’s key adviser Steve Bannon – used the data to build sophisticated psychological profiles of US voters."