Data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica, which has ties to both former Trump chief counselor Steve Bannon and Trump 2020 campaign manager Brad Parscale, harvested private information from more than 50 million Facebook users in developing techniques to support President Donald Trump's 2016 election campaign, the New York Times and London's Observer reported on Saturday.
"Massachusetts residents deserve answers immediately from Facebook and Cambridge Analytica," Maura Healey said on Twitter in a post that linked to a Times report.
The United Kingdom's Information Commission also announced on Saturday they are conducting an investigation of Cambridge Analytica, which also had clients in the country.
"Any criminal and civil enforcement actions arising from the investigation will be pursued vigorously," said Elizabeth Denham, Information Commissioner.
"We exploited Facebook to harvest millions of people’s profiles. And built models to exploit what we knew about them and target their inner demons. That was the basis that the entire company was built on,” Wylie told the Observer.
Through Kogan's company Global Science Research (GSR), in collaboration with Cambridge Analytica, hundreds of thousands of users were paid to take a personality test and agreed to have their data collected for academic use, the Observer said.
Facebook said it acted against Cambridge Analytica and SCL after receiving reports they did not delete information about Facebook users that had been inappropriately shared.
A Cambridge Analytica spokesman said GSR "was contractually committed by us to only obtain data in accordance with the UK Data Protection Act and to seek the informed consent of each respondent."
"When it subsequently became clear that the data had not been obtained by GSR in line with Facebook’s terms of service, Cambridge Analyticadeleted all data received from GSR," he said.
"We worked with Facebook over this period to ensure that they were satisfied that we had not knowingly breached any of Facebook’s terms of service and also provided a signed statement to confirm that all Facebook data and their derivatives had been deleted," the spokesman said.
He said "no data from GSR was used by Cambridge Analytica as part of the services it provided to the Donald Trump 2016 presidential campaign."
"Any claims that voter data were used from another source to support the victory in 2016 are false,” said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
In past interviews with Reuters, Brad Parscale, who ran Trump's digital ad operation in 2016 and is his 2020 re-election campaign manager, has said Cambridge Analytica played a minor role as a contractor in the 2016 campaign.
On its website, Cambridge Analytica says it "provided the Donald J. Trump for President campaign with the expertise and insights that helped win the White House."
"We will take legal action if necessary to hold them responsible and accountable for any unlawful behavior," Facebook said, adding that it was continuing to investigate the claims.
In a Twitter post, Facebook Chief Security Officer Alex Stamos called the news reports "important and powerful" but said it was "incorrect to call this a 'breach' under any reasonable definition of the term."
"We can condemn this behavior while being accurate in our description of it," he said.
Senator Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee, said the case was "more evidence that the online political advertising market is essentially the Wild West" and showed the need for Congress to pass legislation to bring transparency and accountability to online political advertisements.
Cambridge Analytica says it uses "behavioral microtargeting," or combining analysis of people’s personalities with demographics, to predict and influence mass behavior. It says it has data on 220 million Americans, two-thirds of the U.S. population.
That year, Facebook said, it learned that Kogan lied to the company and violated its policies by sharing data he acquired with a so-called "research app" that used Facebook's login system.
The thisisyourdigitallife app was downloaded by about 270,000 people. Facebook said Kogan gained access to profile and other information "in a legitimate way" but "did not subsequently abide by our rules" when he passed the data to SCL/Cambridge Analytica and Wylie.
Facebook said it cut ties to Kogan's app when it learned of the violation, and asked for certification from Kogan and all parties he had given data to that the information had been destroyed.
Although all certified they had destroyed the data, Facebook said it received reports in the past several days that "not all data was deleted."