GSR harvested personal FB data of 5.62L Indian users, shared it with Cambridge Analytica for commercial purposes: CBI FIR

New Delhi: Cambridge Analytica (CA), a company linked to interfering in the 2016 US Presidential Elections, has finally been booked by the Central Bureau of Investigation for illegally purchasing personal Facebook data of up to 5.62 lakh people from a company called Global Science Research Limited (GSR) and purportedly using it to interfere in elections here, officials in the central probe agency said.

The company, which had links to former Trump campaign manager Steve Bannon, has been booked after a nearly 30-month-long preliminary enquiry which started in 2018 based on a complaint from the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology.

Significantly, according to a communication made to the CBI by the MeitY, an additional solicitor general had recommended that an inquiry be started against the companies for illegally mining private and personal data of lakhs of Indians. The ASG, among other charges, had pointed out that Section 171C of the IPC could also be attracted, which deals with unduly influencing free and fair elections. But the CBI has not added this section to their FIR.

According to the CBI, GSR, represented by Dr Aleksandr Kogan, had created an app called "thisisyourdigitallife", which was allowed by Facebook, under their rules to collect and mine data of users for "academic and research purposes". However, the CBI has alleged that the company illegally mined the personal Facebook data of its app users and the data of their friends on the social media application and shared it with CA.

As per the FIR registered by the agency, 335 people had downloaded this application created by GSR and while the CBI had sent letters to all of these users, six had responded - all of them saying that they were misled by "thisisyourdigitallife" and that they were unaware of theirs and their friends' data being accessed by the company.

During the probe, Facebook revealed to the CBI that in addition to these 335 people, the personal data of around 5.62 lakh people who were in the Facebook friends network of these app users had also been harvested and sold to Cambridge Analytica for commercial purposes.

The CBI alleged that data harvested included demographic information of the people, the pages they had liked on Facebook and the contents of their private messages. The agency alleged both CA and GSR had colluded in 2014 for this purpose.

Interestingly, the CBI has not named Facebook as an accused in this data-theft FIR. According to the contents of the agency's allegations, CA and GSR had given a written assurance to Facebook in 2016-17 that they had permanently destroyed the data they had mined from users. But as per the admission of probe officers, the CBI is yet to ascertain whether the data was in fact destroyed.

Furthermore, the MeitY, in its complaint to then CBI Director Alok Verma, had said that while Facebook had responded to all their correspondence regarding this data theft and possible interference in Indian elections, Cambridge Analytica responded to just the first correspondence before disappearing.

CA had told the ministry that it had mined Facebook data of US citizens only and that while they had worked on a range of projects in India for the last 10 years, they had no such data on Indians. Subsequent letters sent by the ministry went unanswered and the government said that CA's initial response was "incomplete and evasive".