According to sources having the knowledge, the Central Bureau of India has sent a written query on Monday to UK-based Cambridge Analytica and Global Science Research (GSR) and US-based Facebook, asking both of them to provide information in relation to its probe into allegedly illegally stealing social networking site data of Indians.
As per the sources from the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), the agency has sent a written query to the Cambridge Analytica’s New York City office, GSR office based in the United Kingdom and Facebook’ office in the United States.
The moves by the agency come in the backdrop of a Preliminary Enquiry (PE) it registered against the foreign firms after it received a directive from the Centre to begin a probe over the matter on August 8.
To investigate the role played by Cambridge Analytica to obtain the data illegally from Facebook, the CBI received a reference from the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology in July this year.
Further to that, the Union Minister for Information and Technology, Mr. Ravi Shankar Prasad had also told Parliament that the government has ordered the Central agency to start its probe and make it out if the British company was indeed involved in violating laws.
Cambridge Analytica is UK based company owned by the hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer. As soon as the allegations were made upon the company about it using personal information by harvesting it from 87 million Facebook accounts to help Donald Trump win the presidential election held in the US in the year 2016, it declared bankruptcy.
The UK-based firms are accused of being responsible for mining personal information without any authorization in early 2014 to enable the building of such a system that could make profiles for individual voters. And data, in turn, was used to personalize political advertisements.
Recently, both the online tech giants, Facebook and Twitter, had to face the heat by the US Congress as executives representing were questioned over the steps taken by the two tech giants to protect the privacy of its users. They apprised the US Congress with details of steps taken by their respective companies.
In our country too, there have been allegations that one of the national parties have misused such data by contracting a firm based in the US to influence the elections by seeking social media advice. After all such news, there seems to be no guarantee regarding private data online.
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