Facebook suspends and investigates data analytics firm Crimson Hexagon

 

Facebook has suspended another analytics based firm from accessing user data while it investigates potential violations of its policy barring surveillance, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Boston-based analytics firm Crimson Hexagon has become the latest casualty after Facebook faced criticism how third-party firms use its data.

In March, news broke that data firm Cambridge Analytica improperly accessed user data.

According to reports, Crimson Hexagon has "contracts to analyse public Facebook data for clients including a Russian nonprofit with ties to the Kremlin and multiple US government agencies”.

Founded in 2007 by chairman Gary King, a professor at Harvard University and director of the university’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science, Crimson Hexagon’s customers include Paramount Pictures, Anheuser-Busch InBev, General Mills, General Motors and Twitter. Investors in Crimson Hexagon include Great Oaks Venture Capital and Sageview Capital.

The data Crimson Hexagon gathered from Facebook comes from public postings such as comments users make on public Facebook pages about companies, brands, celebrities or events.

In a blog post on Friday, Crimson Hexagon CTO Chris Bingham said the company’s governmental customers are allowed to use its platform only for specific approved use cases and that “under no circumstances is surveillance a permitted use case.”

“Government entities that leverage the Crimson Hexagon platform do so for the same reasons as many of our other non-government customers: a broad-based and aggregate understanding of the public’s perception, preferences and sentiment about matters of concern to them,” he wrote.

In addition, Bingham wrote, Crimson Hexagon collects only publicly available social-media data “that anyone can access,” not private data. He noted that the Facebook data accessed by Cambridge Analytica was private.

“What Cambridge Analytica did was explicitly illegal, while the collection of public data is completely legal and sanctioned by the data providers that Crimson engages with, including Twitter and Facebook, among others,” according to Bingham.

“Facebook has a responsibility to help protect people’s information which is one of the reasons why we have tightened our APIs significantly over the last few years,” Ime Archibong, Facebook’s VP of product partnerships, said in a statement.

As of Friday, Facebook’s investigation indicate the analytic firm had not obtained any Facebook or Instagram information inappropriately. 

The company is cooperating with Facebook and they will meet this week to investigate further, Facebook said.