New School Professor Sues Cambridge Analytica

EAST VILLAGE, NY — A professor at The New School has filed a claim against the data company Cambridge Analytica, which on Sunday was revealed to have used harvested data from more than 50 million Facebook users.

The Guardian and the New York Times reported that Cambridge Analytica, a British company hired by President Donald Trump's 2016 election campaign, used the data to develop "psychographic profiles" of voters, potentially allowing political campaigns to precisely target certain demographics.

The revelations spurred outrage and official inquiries into Facebook and Cambridge Analytica on both sides of the Atlantic. David Carroll, an associate professor at The New School, has been working for months to try and reveal Cambridge Analytica's data practices, and on Friday filed a legal claim to try and force the company to show how much data they have on Carroll and how they acquired it.

Carroll's legal action will be closely watched around the world as Facebook users and politicians clamor for more transparency over how the data firm was allowed to access so much data — most of it without permission.

Carroll used a crowd-funded initiative to file the claim in Britain on Friday. Carroll is trying to figure out exactly how much information the company has collected about him without his permission, and how that data was used to predict his political leanings

"I hoped the suit would cause a wake-up call for the whole industry," Carroll told the Columbia Journalism Review. "The line that they like to give to privacy advocates is that it doesn’t do harm, you can’t prove harm so it shouldn’t be regulated. That whole mentality is crumbling before our very eyes. That is the thing that the whole ad-tech house of cards is based on, the idea that we should be able to collect people’s data because you can’t prove it’s harmful."

Cambridge Analytica said in a statement that Carroll's action was "wasting other people’s money with this spurious legal action." The company suspended its CEO Alexander Nix, and is facing questions from British and American lawmakers.

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