Chris Wylie, the former Cambridge Analytica employee turned whistleblower whose discoveries about Facebook data being misused for political campaigning has erased billions off the share significance of the company in recent days and led to the FTC opening a fresh investigation, has suggested the scale of the data spill is substantially larger than has been reported so far.

Giving evidence today, to a UK parliamentary select committee that’s investigating the use of disinformation in political campaigning, Wylie spoke:” The 50 million numeral is what the media has felt safest to report — because of the documents which they can rely on — but my impression is that it was substantially higher than that. So my own position is it was much more than 50 M .”

We’ve reached out to Facebook about Wylie’s claim — but at the time of writing the company had not provided a response.

” There were various iterations of the Facebook harvesting projection ,” Wylie also told the committee, fleshing out the process through which he tells customers’ data was obtained by CA.” It firstly started as a very small captain — firstly to see, most plainly, is this data matchable to an electoral register … We then scaled out slightly is responsible for ensuring that[ Cambridge University professor Alexsandr Kogan] could acquire data in the hurrying that he said he could[ via a personality test app announced thisisyourdigitallife positioned via Facebook’s platform ]. So the first real captain of it was a test of 10, 000 people who joined the app — that was in late May 2014.

” That job extended really well and that’s when we signed a much larger contract with GSR[ Kogan’s fellowship] during the first week of June … 2014. Where the app used to go and self-collected surveys and parties participated the app throughout the summer of 2014 .”

The personal information the app was able to obtain via Facebook formed the” foundational dataset” underpinning both CA and its targeting sits, according to Wylie.

” This is what improved the company ,” he claimed.” This was the foundational dataset that then was modeled to create the algorithm .”

Facebook has previously substantiated 270,000 parties downloaded Kogan’s app — a data harvesting superhighway which, thanks to the lax structure of Facebook’s APIs at the time, facilitated the foreign political consultancy conglomerate to acquire informed on more than 50 million Facebook users, according to the Observer, the vast majority of whom would have had no idea their data had been progressed to CA because they were never personally asked to consent to it.

Instead, their friends were’ consenting’ on behalf of children — likely also without realizing.

Earlier this month, after the latest CA disclosures broke, the DCMS committee invited Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg to answer their questions in person but he has so far diminished their summons. Though it has just been reported that he may lastly appear before Congress to face the issue of how useds’ data has been so widely misappropriation via his platform.

In a letter to the DCMS committee, dated yesterday, Facebook said it is working with regulators in different countries to confirm exactly how many local users have been affected by data leak.

It adds that around 1 per cent of the users whose data was illicitly obtained by CA were European Union customers. This small fraction seems unsurprising, afforded CA was working for the Trump campaign — and therefore aiming to gather data on Americans for 2016 presidential safarus targeting intents. EU citizens’ data wouldn’t have had any relevance to that.

” There will be two situates of data ,” Facebook writes in its letter to the committee discussing the data legislated to CA.” The first is people who downloaded the app, and the second is the number of friends of those people who have their privacy prepares set in such a way that the app could see some of their data. This second illustration will be much higher than the first and we will look to provide both broken down by country as soon as we are capable of .”

Facebook’s privacy installs have caused major regulatory and legal headaches for the company over its first year. In 2012, for example, Facebook settled with the FTC over accusations it had entrapped users by “telling them they could keep their information on Facebook private, and then repeatedly allowing it to be shared and made public”.

And in 2011 and 2012, following a legal disorder by European privacy activist and lawyer Max Schrems, Facebook was implored by the Irish Data Protection Commissioner to tighten app permissions to avoid exactly the kind of friends data leakage that has just scaled into this major privacy scandal.

Instead, Facebook put off tightening up API assents until as late as mid 2015 — thereby causing CA a window of opportunity to pull massive amounts of Facebook user data ahead of the 2016 US presidential election.

When CA’s( currently postponed) CEO, Alexander Nix, sounded before the DCMS committee in February he was asked whether it worked with GSR and what use it made of GSR data. At that time Nix claimed CA had not worked any GSR data.

The company is continuing to push this indication, claiming in a series of tweets today that while it paid $500 k for GSR data it subsequently” deleted the data “. It further claims it expended alternative data sources and data sets to build its frameworks.” Our algorithms and frameworks carry no discover of it ,” it has furthermore tweeted re: the GSR data.

( Following its present session, CA has also now bring out a longer response proclamation, refuting numerous parts of Wylie’s testimony and claiming he has ” misrepresented himself and the company “. In this it also affirms:” Cambridge Analytica does not maintain any GSR data or any data is coming from GSR data. We have never shared the GSR data with Aggregate IQ[ another alleged affiliate company ], Palantir or any other entity. Cambridge Analytica did not use any GSR data in the effort that we did for the Donald J. Trump for President campaign .”)

Asked by the committee about Nix’s earlier, affirming indication, Wylie meditated out loud why CA spent” the better part of$ 1M on GSR” — pointing likewise to” copious amounts of email” and other official documents he says he has provided to the committee as additional suggestion, including invoicing and” pair paces on the data “.

“That’s just not true,” he postulated of CA’s claim not to have use GSR( and therefore Facebook) data.

Kogan himself has previously claimed he was unaware exactly what CA wanted to use the data for.” I knew it was for government consulting but beyond that no idea ,” he told Anderson Cooper in a Tv interview broadcast on March 21, claiming likewise that he did not know that CA was working for Trump or whether they even expended the data his app had gathered.

Kogan too recommended the data he had been able to gather was not very accurate at an individual level — claiming it would only be useful in aggregate to, for example,” understand the personality of New Yorkers “.

Wylie was asked by the committee how the data was used by CA. Paying an example he alleges the company’s approach was to target different parties for advertising on the basis of their” dispositional peculiarities and personality idiosyncrasies” — idiosyncrasies it sought to predict via decorations in the data.

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For example, if you are able to create profiling algorithms that can predict sure-fire traits — so let’s add a high degree of openness and a high degree of neuroticism — and when you look at that profiles that’s the characteristics of the a person who’s more prone towards conspiratorial consider, for example, they’re open sufficient to kind of is attached to concepts that may not really seem reasonable to your average person. And they’re watchful fairly and impulse enough to start click and reading and looking at stuffs — and so if you can create a psychological chart of a type of person who is more prone to adopting certain forms of intuitions, conspiracies for example, you can identify what such person or persons looks like in data words. You can then used to go and prophesy how likely somebody is going to be to adopt more conspiratorial messaging. And then advertise or target them with blogs or websites or numerous — what everybody now announces phony news — so that they start witnessing all of these feelings, or all of these fibs around them in their digital milieu. They don’t see it when they watch CNN or NBC or BBC. And they start to go well why is that everyone’s talking about this online? Why is it that I’m seeing everything now but the mainstream media isn’t talking about[ it ]… Not everyone’s going to adopt that — so that advantage of using profiling is you can find the specific group of people who are more prone to adopting that mind as your early adopters … So if you can find those people in your datasets because you know what they look like in terms of data you can catalyze a trend over period. But you two are need to find what those people look like.

” That was the basis of a lot of our experiment[ at CA and sister fellowship SCL ],” he lent.” How far can we go with specific types of beings. And who is it that we would need to target with what types of messaging .”

Wylie told the committee that Kogan’s company was lay out alone for the purposes of obtaining data for CA, and said here house chose to work with Kogan because another professor it had approached firstly had asked for a substantial remittance up front and a 50% equity share — whereas he had agreed to work on the project to obtain the data firstly, and consider commercial terms later.

” The distribute was that[ Kogan] could maintain all the data and do research or whatever he wanted to do with is and so for him it was appealing because you had a company that was the equivalent of no academic gift could compete with the amount of money that we are capable of spend on it, and also we didn’t have to go through all the conformity nonsense ,” computed Wylie.” So we are to be able literally only start next week and pay for whatever you want. So my intuition at the time was that for an academic that would be quite appealing .”

” All kinds of parties[ had] access to the data”

Another claim made by Wylie during the session was that the secretive US big data conglomerate Palantir cured CA improve examples off of the Facebook data — although he also said there was no formal contract in place between the two firms.

Wylie announced Palantir was introduced to CA’s Nix by Sophie Schmidt, Google chairman Eric Schmidt’s daughter, during an internship at CA.

” We actually had several gathers with Palantir whilst I was there ,” claimed Wylie.” And some of the documentation that I’ve also provided to the committee …[ establishes] there were elderly Palantir employees that were also working on the Facebook data .”

The VC-backed firm is known for accommodating government, commerce, healthcare and other organizations with analytics, its safety and other data management solutions.

” That was not an official contract between Palantir and Cambridge Analytica but there were Palantir staff who would come into the office and work on the data ,” Wylie computed.” And we would go and are in conformity with Palantir staff at Palantir. So, exactly to clarify, Palantir didn’t officially contract with Cambridge Analytica. But there used to be Palantir staff who helped construct the prototypes that we were working on .”

Contacted for comment on this allegation a Palantir spokesperson refuted it absolutely — requiring TechCrunch with this emailed affirmation:” Palantir has never had a relationship with Cambridge Analytica nor have we ever worked on any Cambridge Analytica data .”

The committee went on to ask Wylie why he was coming forward to tell this history now, leaved his involvement in constructing the targeting engineerings — and therefore likewise his interests in the related political campaigns.

Wylie responded by saying that he had grown increasingly unpleasant with CA during his time working there and with the methodology used being used.

” Nothing good has come from Cambridge Analytica ,” he included.” It’s not a legitimate business .”

In a statement put out on its Twitter yesterday, CA’s playing CEO Alex Tayler sought to interval the conglomerate from Wylie and play down his role there, claiming: “The source of accusations is not a whistleblower or a the founding fathers of the company. He was at the company for less than a year, after which he was established the topics in restraining undertakes to prevented his misappropriation of the company’s intellectual property .”

Asked whether he’s received any law menaces since realise his allegations public, Wylie said the most law pushback he’s received as yet has come from Facebook, rather than CA.

” It’s Facebook who’s most upset about this history ,” he told the committee.” They’ve transmitted some somewhat intimidating legal match. They haven’t actually taken action on that … They’ve gone silent, they won’t talk to me anymore.

” But I do forecast some robust pushback from Cambridge Analytica because this is sort of an existential crisis for them ,” he added.” But I think that I have a fairly robust public interest protection to breaking that NDA and that tackle of confidentiality[ that he previously signed with CA ].”

The committee too pressed Wylie on whether he himself had had access to the Facebook data he claims CA used to build its targeting frameworks. Wylie said that he had, though he claims he deleted his duplicate of the data” some time in 2015″.

During the testimony Wylie too hinted Facebook might have found out about the GSL data gleaning job as early as July 2014 — because he responds Kogan told him, around that time, that he had spoken to Facebook engineers after his app’s data collection pace had been throttled by the platform.

” He told me that he had a discourse with some designers at Facebook ,” enunciated Wylie.” So Facebook would have known from that time about development projects because he had a gossip with Facebook’s engineers — or at least that’s what he told me … Facebook’s account of it is that they had no idea until the Guardian firstly reported it at the end of 2015 — and then they decided to send out characters. They cast a letter addressed to me in August 2016 asking do you know where this data might be, or was it removed?

” It’s interesting that … the year of the note is the same month that Cambridge Analytica officially connected the Trump campaign. So I’m not sure if Facebook was genuinely concerned about the data or really the optics of y’know now this firm is not just some random conglomerate in Britain, it’s now working for a presidential campaign .”

We likewise asked Facebook if it had any general have responded to Wylie’s testimony but at the time of writing the company has not been able to responded to this request for statement either.

Did Facebook make any efforts to retrieve or delete data, the meetings of the committee also invited Wylie.” No they didn’t ,” he responded.” Not to my knowledge. They surely didn’t with me — until after I vanished public and then they realized me suspect number one despite the fact the ICO[ UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office] wrote to me and to Facebook said today no I’ve actually given over everything to the authorities .”

” I suspect that when Facebook looked at what happened in 2016… they croaked if we make a big deal of this this might be optically not the best thing to make a big fuss about ,” he suggested.” So I don’t think they pushed it in part because if you want to really probe a large data infraction that’s going to get off and that were likely to effect troubles. So my impres was they wanted to push it under the rug .”

” All kinds of beings[ had] access to the data ,” he added.” It was everywhere .”