AggregateIQ accused of using purloined Facebook data to target US voters

AgreggateIQ is latest company to be drawn into Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal

Cambridge Analytica (CA) whistleblower Christopher Wylie has said that Canadian company AggregateIQ used algorithms from the illegally-acquired Facebook data, held by CA, to build software to target Republican voters in the 2016 US election.

Wylie is the former CA employee who revealed last week that the company had acquired the information of 50 million people from Facebook, using it to build voter profiles. It has been accused of using the data, or allowing it to be used, to tamper with the 2016 US election and the UK's Brexit referendum.

He told a British parliamentary committee that AggregateIQ had built software called Ripon, which was designed to profile voters.

The company is still to issue a comment or statement about the accusation. It has previously said that it had ‘never been and is not' part of CA, and had never ‘entered into a contract' with the firm.

For its part, CA has said that it never shared any of the Facebook data with AggregateIQ.

Wylie gave his evidence shortly after Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg declined to appear before the committee. The head of the committee, Damian Collins, urged Zuckerberg to reconsider, saying, "It is now time to hear from a senior Facebook executive with the sufficient authority to give an accurate account of this catastrophic failure of process."

Facebook is instead sending either chief technology officer Mike Schroepfer or chief product officer Chris Cox to the meeting.

Zuckerberg has, however, issued a statement admitting that his company ‘made mistakes'.

"The good news is that the most important actions to prevent this from happening again today we have already taken years ago," Zuckerberg said, referring to changes made to Facebook's developer platform policies in 2014 that saw devs banned from gathering data about the friends of people using their apps - which is how CA was able to harvest so much information from the social networking site by directly interacting with only 300,000 people.