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Facebook suspended applications from a data badysis company, Crimson Hexagon, to establish whether its contracts with the US government and a Russian non-profit organization violate the rules of the social network, reported The Wall Street Journal.
This decision comes as Facebook is entangled for several months in the scandal Cambridge Analytica, a British company accused of collecting and exploiting without their consent the personal data of users for political purposes, including to win the UK Brexit and Donald Trump in the US
Crimson Hexagon, an American company in Boston, says its platform allows its customers, including major US groups, to badyze their audience and study the perception of their brand.
According to the business daily, government contracts with this company, which operates public data of Facebook, had not been previously approved by the social network.
Since 2014, US federal agencies have paid more than $ 800,000 to Crimson Hexagon for a total of 22 contracts, adds the Wall Street Journal in its article published on Friday.
Crimson Hexagon sold its badysis platform also abroad, notably in Turkey and Russia, where it worked in 2014 with a non-profit organization linked to the Russian government, reports the newspaper. According to him, the company mistakenly received at least one private data from Instagram, a subsidiary of Facebook.
Facebook asked Crimson Hexagon for more information. At this point, however, "based on our investigation, Crimson Hexagon has not obtained any information from Facebook or Instagram inappropriately," said a spokesman for the social network quoted by the daily.
A Boston society executive, Chris Bingham, wrote in a blog note on Friday that Crimson Hexagon only collects publicly available data on social media, which is "completely legal."
In the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Facebook acknowledged that the data of up to 87 million users had been hijacked by the British company, which was working for candidate Trump's campaign in 2016.
As a result of these revelations, Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg had had to explain at length to American and then European parliamentarians who were very up against the social network, accused of laxity and opacity in its management of the mountains of personal data he owns and who feed his model
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