“We have a responsibility to protect your data, and if we fail, we don't deserve your trust. We will make sure that doesn't happen again." This is Mark Zuckerberg's mea culpa after the scandal caused by Cambridge Analytica, a political marketing company that stole personal data from 51 million Facebook profiles to exploit them in some electoral campaigns, starting with that of Donald Trump.
The father of the most famous social network in the world does not explicitly apologize and above all does not explain why, when he discovered the abuses of Cambridge Analytica in 2015, Facebook said nothing either to users or to public opinion (in the US it is already match the first class action).
The Trojan horse that allowed the British company to obtain the personal information of tens of millions of Americans is a Facebook app designed by psychologist Aleksandr Kogan, a researcher at the University of Cambridge. “We immediately deleted Kogan's app from Facebook – explains Zuckerberg – and we asked Kogan and Cambridge Analytica to delete the data, with proof. Last week we learned from the Guardian, New York Times and Channel 4 that perhaps that data had not been deleted. We are investigating".
Zuckerberg then announced further security measures, new investigations into all Facebook applications and games and further limits on the managers of these apps: "We will continue to make Facebook safer: what happened with Cambridge Analytica will never happen again".
Meanwhile, the scandal risks spreading. Not only has Cambridge Analytica also worked for the pro-Brexit campaign in the UK, but yesterday it was also discovered that the company which controls it, Scl Group, has collaborated with the British Ministry of Defense and until 2013 was on the "List X”, which means that he had access to secret documents and classified information.
And in our country? According to La Repubblica, during a conference at the end of 2013, the SCL exponents said they had already worked in Italy for a party that "had had its last successes in the XNUMXs" and which, thanks to them too, had obtained a result higher than expected. The Roman newspaper identifies this party with the Brothers of Italy, but the press office of the formation led by Giorgia Meloni denies it.
In any case, an internal video shot by one of the analysts of Scl Elections, the political arm of the company, documents a meeting in the London office in April 2016 during which, according to the overlay “Scl Italy?”, the opening of a branch in our country.
