# Aleksandr Kogan Cambridge University psychologist whose Facebook personality-quiz app, *thisisyourdigitallife*, harvested the data that ended up with [[Cambridge Analytica]] — the [[Robert Mercer]]-funded, [[Steve Bannon]]-connected firm that worked for the Trump campaign in 2016. He is the technical origin point of the [[Cambridge Analytica Scandal]]. ## The harvest | Date | Event | |---|---| | 2014 | Founds Global Science Research (GSR) | | June 4, 2014 | GSR contracts with SCL Elections, Cambridge Analytica's parent, to supply data or models from the app | | 2014–15 | About 270,000 people install the app; through Facebook's then-permissive friend permissions it collects data on tens of millions of their friends | | 2015 | Facebook learns of the violation and asks for certification the data was deleted | | Mar 16, 2018 | Facebook suspends Cambridge Analytica, SCL, Kogan and [[Christopher Wylie]] | | Apr 4, 2018 | Facebook raises its estimate of affected users to **up to 87 million** | | June 19, 2018 | Tells a Senate Commerce subcommittee the data had "little to no use" for ad targeting | | July 24, 2019 | The [[FTC]] settles with Kogan and [[Alexander Nix]] — neither admitting nor denying — requiring deletion of the data. The same month the FTC fined Facebook $5 billion in the related privacy case | > [!note] The numbers > "87 million" is Facebook's worldwide upper bound. The FTC and the UK Information Commissioner's firmer counts are around **30 million identifiable U.S. users**. Kogan himself described about 30 million personality profiles. ## The Russia question Kogan also held funding from and lectured at St Petersburg State University from 2014, which fed speculation that the data had reached Russia. The UK Information Commissioner's final findings in October 2020 found **no additional evidence of Russian involvement**, and concluded the data could not have been used in the Brexit referendum. Don't cite him as a Russian channel; the investigators looked and didn't find one. ## Why it matters here The Kogan app is the concrete mechanism behind the vault's [[Psychographic Profiling]] and [[Microtargeting]] pages: a researcher's app, a lax platform, and a political consultancy funded by one of the right's biggest donors. Whether the "psychographics" actually worked is disputed — Kogan says no — but the data transfer is not. ## See Also - [[Cambridge Analytica]] · [[Cambridge Analytica Scandal]] · [[SCL Group]] - [[Alexander Nix]] · [[Christopher Wylie]] · [[Robert Mercer]] · [[Steve Bannon]] - [[Meta]] · [[Facebook Timeline]]