Irish regulator has questions

[struggle4progress]

Karlin Lillington

... The interwoven strands of the story are intriguingly complex. Cambridge Analytica was employed by the Trump campaign, and one of its former directors was Steve Bannon, the founder of the alt-right platform Breitbart and a former special adviser to President Trump. The company is funded by the conservative hedge-fund billionaire Robert Mercer, who donated Cambridge Analytica’s services to Nigel Farage for the Brexit referendum campaign ...

... Facebook for years allowed third-party developers to use apps it had distributed to stealthily harvest data from the Facebook friends of whoever was lured to participate in the platform’s ubiquitous third-party quizzes and games. Unwitting users rarely noticed that using such apps also granted access to their friends’ data.

Only when Max Schrems, the Austrian privacy activist, brought a case against Facebook and the Irish Data Protection Commissioner a few years ago – in part over exactly this type of data gathering by third parties without clear disclosure or his consent, ruled unlawful by the European Court of Justice – did the company change this practice ...

... pressing questions at the moment sit with Facebook’s Irish regulator. In Europe the company falls under the scrutiny of the Irish Data Protection Commissioner, who must also ensure corporate compliance with EU law and the judgments of the European Court of Justice. The UK data commissioner is taking a key role in the investigation of Cambridge Analytica in that country, but the Irish commissioner, Helen Dixon, will have the far more comprehensive role as Facebook’s European regulator ...

https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/cambridge-analytica-and-facebook-irish-regulator-has-questions-to-answer-1.3434251

[struggle4progress]

1. Sinn Fin demand investigation into DUP's links to data analytics company

Sinn Féin MP Francie Molloy has asked for an investigation into the DUP's links with a Canadian data anaytics company at the centre of a global data harvesting scandal.

Data firm Cambridge Analytica was suspended from Facebook last week after it was claimed details about millions of users had not been destroyed as agreed.

Whistleblower Chris Wylie, a former research director at the UK-based company, told Channel 4 News that a 'data grab' had been carried out on more than 50 million profiles in 2014 ...

During the 2016 EU referendum, the DUP - who campaigned for a Leave vote - spent £32,750 of a £425,000 donation from the pro-union Constitutional Research Council on services from AggregateIQ, which is linked to Cambridge Analytica ...

https://www.irishnews.com/news/2018/03/20/news/sinn-fe-in-demand-investigation-into-dup-s-links-to-data-analytics-company-1283828/

[muriel_volestrangler]

3. Source of DUP donation to remain secret

The source of a controversial donation to the Democratic Unionists during the Brexit campaign will remain secret, despite a vote to extend transparency rules to Northern Ireland.

The rules will only apply to donations made after July 2017, so anything relating to the Brexit referendum remains under wraps. And that includes a donation of more than £400,000 to the DUP which was spent on pro-Brexit adverts, including one in the London- based Metro newspaper which doesn’t even come out in Northern Ireland.

https://www.channel4.com/news/source-of-dup-donation-to-remain-secret

Video at the link, but Wikipedia explains it too:

The Constitutional Research Council (CRC) is a Unionist funding organisation, chaired by Scottish Conservative Richard Cook. It helped to fund the anti-independence Better Together campaign during the Scottish independence referendum in 2014 and the DUP’s Leave campaign in Northern Ireland, and in mainland Britain, during the Brexit referendum in 2016.[1]

The CRC has also funded the European Research Group and its chairman, the Brexit minister Steve Baker.[2]

The CRC has no website, publishes no accounts and does not reveal the names of its donors. The only office-holder to be made public is the chairman Richard Cook, a former vice-chairman of the Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party, parliamentary candidate in Glasgow Cathcart in 2003 and at the 2005 by-election, and a supporter of the Freedom Association.[3] Cook has had business connections with Prince Nawwaf bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, the former Saudi minister for finance, government spokesman, diplomat and head of intelligence, and the Danish arms dealer Peter Haestrup who has been linked to a gun running case in West Bengal described by Indian authorities as “the biggest crime in the country's history".[4]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitutional_Research_Council

It used a loophole in UK law that Northern Irish parties did not have to disclose their funding sources, while British ones did. The DUP promptly spent the money outside Northern Ireland, mostly in London.

[struggle4progress]

2. Revelations are only 'tip of the iceberg', warns EU data protection chief

Speaking on Tuesday, Giovanni Buttarelli, the European data protection supervisor (EDPS), also said he believes the revelations are only the “tip of the iceberg.”

Facebook and Cambridge Analytica, based in the UK, are at the centre of a dispute over the harvesting and use of personal data - and whether it was used to influence the outcome of the US 2016 presidential election or the UK Brexit referendum.

On Tuesday, the UK information commissioner said he was seeking an urgent court warrant to enter the London headquarters of the elections consultancy Cambridge Analytica after the firm was caught in an undercover sting and accused of using honey traps and running fake news campaigns ...

https://www.theparliamentmagazine.eu/articles/news/cambridge-analytica-revelations-are-only-tip-iceberg-warns-eu-data-protection-chief