Facebook has suspended another data analytics firm amid claims that the company has been improperly harvesting user information. The firm, Cubeyou, gathered data under the guise of academic research, then shared it with marketers, a CNBC report found.
The tactics echo those of Cambridge Analytica, a data firm that accessed and shared information from as many as 87 million users without permission for political marketing. Cubeyou created personality quizzes that reached tens of millions of Facebook users, labeling the privacy permissions as "non-exclusive access for research purposes only." However, the quizzes allowed Cubeyou to access personal information that was disclosed to third parties, such as location, age, relationship status, likes, comments on posts, and mentions of brands. A previous version of the quizzes also gave Cubeyou access to the personal data of a user's friends.
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