Was the now infamous Cambridge Analytica in talks with Cong for 2019 polls?

Strategic Communication Laboratories (SCL), the firm that drove American president Donald trump’s campaign for his smashing victory into the White House, has been banned from Facebook for violating its policies and commitments.

A little known fact about Cambridge Analytica, the political data analytics arm of Strategic Communication Laboratories (SCL), is that the same company was reportedly in talks with Indian National Congress to manage their social media campaign for the 2019 legislative elections to tap in the whopping 240-million Facebook user base in India. 

According to The Verge, the companies are widely credited with helping Trump more effectively target voters on Facebook than his rival Hillary Clinton.

Also Read: Facebook suspends SCL, Trump-linked data analysis firm for policy violation

In a blog post, Paul Grewal, Vice President and Deputy General Counsel at Facebook said, “In 2015, we learned that a psychology professor at the University of Cambridge named Dr. Aleksandr Kogan lied to us and violated our Platform Policies by passing data from an app that was using Facebook Login to SCL/Cambridge Analytica.”

“Kogan requested and gained access to information from people after they chose to download his app. His app, “thisisyourdigitallife,” offered a personality prediction, and billed itself on Facebook as “a research app used by psychologists.” Approximately 270,000 people downloaded the app. In so doing, they gave their consent for Kogan to access information such as the city they set on their profile,” the blog post further said.