The data firm was in serious trouble in several countries following disclosures about its use of Facebook data and the campaign tactics it employed to influence people for their clients.
Just when many countries, including India, were threatening legal action against Cambridge Analytica, the data firm that worked for President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign and was suspected to have indulged in direct and indirect data mining in India for purposes still unknown, there is news that the company is shutting down.
«The Company is immediately ceasing all operations and the boards have applied to appoint insolvency practitioners Crowe Clark Whitehill LLP to act as the independent administrator for Cambridge Analytica,» it said in a statement.
In its statement, Cambridge Analytica said that it was a victim. «Over the past several months, Cambridge Analytica has been the subject of numerous unfounded accusations and, despite the Company’s efforts to correct the record, has been vilified for activities that are not only legal, but also widely accepted as a standard component of online advertising in both the political and commercial arenas,» it said.
The data firm was in serious trouble in several countries following disclosures about its use of Facebook data and the campaign tactics it employed to influence people for their clients.
In March there was a video that showed company’s chief executive Alexander Nix boasting of campaign tactics which included entrapment Of political opponents with bribes and sex.
Following the expose the company had suspended Nix, and to silence the outrage claimed that it had launched an independent investigation to ascertain whether the company engaged in any illegal work on political campaigns.
Recently the Indian Information Technology Ministry had fired a second notice to the company to file details of what kind of data was mined by the company, through which means and subsidiaries in India and the mined data was used for what purposes. The ministry was terribly «miffed» with the data firm’s reply to its first notice. Top officials had claimed that to a long list of queries the company had provided one line answers and the reply on the whole «smacked of arrogance».
The company’s decision to shut down operations may end up creating a dead-end for Indian authorities who want to know how wide were Cambridge Analytica and it’s parent company SCL’s operations in India and how the company was using this penetration
CA was in deeper trouble in India when the govt received a conclusive evidence of the company’s illegal activities from Facebook. The social networking site last month admitted that in 2014 an app on its platform siphoned data of 350 odd Indian users who downloaded it and over 5 lakh of their friend’s on Facebook. This data was stolen by the app operator Alexander Kogan and was sold to Cambridge Analytica.
Sources in Indian companies which have been associated with CA in the recent past say that the decision to shut down was taken as the one time very popular company was losing clients due to the recent bad name and the mounting legal troubles that not only involved angry companies like Facebook but governments of sovereign nations
«The trouble of facing legal cases all over the world and the legal fee was assessed as a major hurdle against future existence. There was an attempt to rebrand the company’s profile and business. But the board found that proposition replete with problems» said the head of a one-time partner companies of SCL in India.
It was a bad day for Cambridge Analytica’s employees as they found that the parent company SCL GEOUP was shutting down. Worse workers based In USA were directed by the management to «return their keycard»
ALSO READ: What is Cambridge Analytica scandal: Everything you need to know about Facebook data leak
Past and current partners of SCL/CA we’re keeping an eye on the developments in the UK based company. A senior manager in one of the firms said, «we are told that there was a conference call between various Cambridge Analytica offices in London, Washington DC, New York City and Virginia on Wednesday afternoon. In the conference Julian Wheatland, the current chairman of the SCL Group said that the investigations into Cambridge Analytica’s data harvesting scandal, damaged reputation, and loss of clients were the reason for the decision.»
The shutdown of CA may block the chances of Indian authorities getting more answers, especially after the conclusion of the SCL internal report. The report says, «SCL makes no secret of its involvement in the 2010 Bihar Assembly Elections as can be seen from the following passage, on its website: CA was contracted to undertake an in-depth electorate analysis for the Bihar Assembly Election in 2010. The core challenge was to identify the floating/swing voters for each of the parties and to measure their levels electoral apathy, a result of the poor and unchanging condition of the state after 15 years of incumbent rule. In addition to the research phase, CA were tasked to organize the party base at the village level by creating a communication hierarchy to increase supporter motivation.»
ALSO READ: Twitter reportedly sold users’ data, but Cambridge Analytica has denied it
