Cambridge Analytica, which is under scrutiny for improperly using Facebook data, live-tweeted that it did nothing wrong during Mark Zuckerberg’s testimony before Congress on Tuesday.
The company stressed that its work was legal and insisted that when Facebook asked it to delete personal data it acquired from the social media platform it complied..
“We did not hack Facebook or break any laws,” Cambridge Analytica insisted.
It claimed that an affiliated company “licensed data from a research company called GSR which obtained the data via a tool provided by Facebook, a common practice at the time.”
The tool was a personality quiz app that gave Cambridge access to information from “about tens of millions” of people, according to Zuckerberg’s opening statement before the Senate Judiciary and Commerce committees.
Facebook changed the rules for those apps in 2014 to prevent abuses, Zuckerberg said, but added that it was not clear if Cambridge followed the rules or if they still had the data.
Cambridge disputed that assessment.
“Once Facebook told us that their terms of services had been broken, we deleted all the GSR data and its derivatives, and certified this to Facebook,” the company said.
“An independent audit is being conducted to verify this.”