Internal Emails: Facebook Aware of Cambridge Analytica as Early as September 2015

claims about third-party developers matching social media data to voter files. A few months later, an alleged relationship between Cambridge Analytica and Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas's presidential campaign was reported. “We suspect many of these companies are doing similar types of scraping, the largest and most aggressive on the conservative side being Cambridge Analytica,” a Facebook employee wrote Sept. 22, 2015. The email describes the research firm as a “sketchy (to say the least) data modeling company that has penetrated our market deeply.” Various employees question whether such data scraping methods comply with platform policy, with one writing, “I imagine it would be 'very' difficult to engage in data-scraping activity as you described while still being compliant.” Facebook released the documents through agreement with Washington, D.C., Attorney General Karl Racine (D), who's suing the platform over related data privacy allegations (see 1907010066). Racine “fought to make this document public because we believe the American people have a right to know what and when Facebook knew about its data security weaknesses,” a spokesperson said in a statement: According to the documents, employees “were raising alarms about political partners and doubts about their compliance with Facebook’s data policies as far back as September 2015.” Facebook wasn’t aware that researcher Aleksandr Kogan sold data to Cambridge Analytica until December 2015, Vice President Paul Grewal wrote: “That is a fact that we have testified to under oath, that we have described to our core regulators, and that we stand by today.” An employee shared unsubstantiated rumors from a Cambridge Analytica competitor in September 2015 about the data scraping, he said, arguing the document provides no substantively new information.