LOS ANGELES – Facebook, still grappling with the fallout of the scandal over user data incorrectly obtained by the Cambridge Analytica consulting firm, has suspended another company's business. Data Analysis on
Facebook stated that it had temporarily suspended the firm Crimson Hexagon, while seeking to find out if it violated data sharing policies. Facebook was responding to a Wall Street Journal investigation that reported that Crimson Hexagon had contracts to badyze Facebook data for customers including several US government agencies and a Russian organization with Kremlin links.
Facebook said that based on its investigation up here, Crimson Hexagon has not obtained any Facebook or Instagram information inappropriately. "We do not allow developers to build monitoring tools from information from Facebook or Instagram," said a company representative in a statement. "We take these allegations seriously, and we have suspended these applications while we investigate."
In a blog Friday, Crimson Hexagon CTO Chris Bingham said that corporate government clients are allowed to use his platform only for "
" Government entities that use the Crimson Hexagon platform do so for the same reasons as many of our other non-government clients: a broad and diverse approach.
In addition, writes Bingham, Crimson Hexagon only collects publicly available social media data "to which everyone can have access", not private data. . He noted that the data of Facebook accessible by Cambridge Analytica were private
"What Cambridge Analytica did was explicitly illegal, whereas the collection of public data is completely legal and sanctioned by the data providers with whom Crimson s & ### Engages, including Twitter and Facebook, According to Crimson Hexagon, based in Boston, it maintains a database of over 1 trillion social media posts, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit and Facebook. Other Discussion Forums, Blogs and Other Sources The company prides itself on having the largest volume of text and unstructured images in the world on social, public and private data sources.
According to Facebook policies, users can share their information with Facebook and Instagram, and the social media company offers application programming interfaces. to allow developers to use public or aggregated information for commercial purposes. "19659004" Facebook has the responsibility to protect the information of users. Ime Archibong, vice president of Facebook's product partnerships, said in a statement
According to the Crimson Hexagon website, customers include Paramount Pictures, Anheuser-Busch InBev, Adidas, General Mills, General Motors and Twitter. The company was founded in 2007 by President Gary King, a professor at Harvard University and director of the Institute of Quantitative Social Sciences at the university. Investors in Crimson Hexagon include Great Oaks Venture Capital and Sageview Capital
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The situation with Crimson Hexagon comes after revelations about information on up to 87 million Facebook users may have been incorrectly sold through a third-party researcher with Cambridge Analytica, a firm that worked for Donald Trump's 2016 US presidential campaign to target Facebook users
In the wake of Cambridge Analytica, Facebook suspended 200 third-party apps that had access to large amounts of information awaiting examination to know if they misused this data. Facebook claims to have changed its policies in 2014 to prevent applications from accessing information about users' friends in the manner that led to the collection of data that was collected on Cambridge Analytica's servers.