Steve Bannon tried to distance himself from the Cambridge Analytica scandal on Thursday, claiming: “I didn’t even know anything about the Facebook mining.”
Bannon is a former vice-president and board member of the political consultancy, which he agreed he “put together.” He claimed to a conference in New York that neither he nor Cambridge Analytica had anything to do with “dirty tricks” in the use of information harvested from Facebook to make computer models to sway elections.
Besides, he said, “Facebook data is for sale all over the world”.
Bannon – Donald Trump’s former chief strategist – later said outside the conference room that he “did not remember” being part of any scheme to buy data that came from Facebook and divert it to use for election propaganda, as the Observer revealed last weekend.
He blamed any “dirty tricks” on Cambridge Analytica’s parent company, SCL, which he described as “the British guys, old Etonians and guys from Oxford and Cambridge”.
And he denied that his former benefactor, US hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, who co-owns Cambridge Analytica, had any financial links to SCL. Mercer was also a major donor to Trump’s election campaign.
It was Bannon’s first public appearance and statement since the explosive reportsby the Observer and the Guardian, sister publications, last weekend, that the personal data of about 50 million Americans had been harvested and improperly shared with Cambridge Analytica.
The international data analytics operation, which worked with Trump’s election team, scraped millions of Facebook profiles of US voters and information about their social media friends, then used them for political propaganda.
It is one of the tech giant’s biggest ever data breaches, and the data gleaned was used to build a powerful software program to predict and influence choices at the ballot box.
The tech firm used personal information in early 2014 to build a system that could profile individual US voters, in order to target them with personalised political advertisements, tech whistleblower and former employee Christopher Wylie told the Observer.
For more read the full of article at The Guardian
