MENLO PARK, CALIFORNIA — Facebook is facing calls for regulation after reports a political consultant gained access to 50 million users' data.
The company disclosed the news in a blog post last Friday. American and British lawmakers are demand on Sunday Facebook explain how so many profiles were harvested without the social network notifying users, according to the New York Times.
According the New York Times and the Observer, Cambridge Analytica used personal information taken without permission early in 2014 to build a system that could profile US voters, in order more effectively target them with personalized political ads.
The data has not been deleted despite Facebook's demands beginning in 2015.
Around 270,000 people allowed a researcher to use their personal data, who also scraped the data of all their friends as well, until the end of 2015.
The researcher then sold the data to Cambridge Analytica. Cambridge Analytica worked on Trump's 2016 campaign. According to Reuters, a Trump campaign official said it used Republican data sources for voter information, not Cambridge Analytica.
Facebook is claiming Cambridge Analytica and researchers were in breach of policy and that it was exploring legal action.
