REPRESENTATIVES of the SNP met with Cambridge Analytica, a whisteblower told MPs yesterday; but the party insisted they’d walked away from the disgraced firm at the time, calling them a “bunch of cowboys”.
It was one of the many stunning revelations at the meeting of the Digital, Culture, Media and Sports committee’s inquiry into fake news from Brittany Kaiser, a former senior member of Cambridge Analytica (CA).
She also claimed the number of profiles hacked by the company for data may be far greater than the 87 million suggested by Facebook.
The disclosure about the meeting with the SNP came in Kaiser’s reply to a question from the SNP MP Brendan O’Hara.
He asked her about a claim on CA’s website about having worked for British political parties.
Kaiser said that was advertising bluff, and simply not true.
She added: “I do know that we have been in pitches and negotiations with UK parties in the past, such as the SNP.”
She went on: “I was not a part of those pitches or negotiations ... I believe that there were meetings that took place in London, where individuals came down to visit us in our Mayfair headquarters, and then further meetings were undertaken in Edinburgh, near the parliament.”
It wasn’t clear when those meetings took place, or what those meetings were about.
Kaiser told the committee: “I could probably look through some old emails and find some names for you and submit that after this inquiry.”
A visibly stunned O’Hara asked Kaiser to “allow me to follow that particular stag into the forest”.
A spokesman for the party said: “The SNP has never worked with Cambridge Analytica. An external consultant had one meeting in London. His assessment was that they were ‘a bunch of cowboys’, which turned out to be true. No further meetings were held.”
Kaiser also said that as well the personality test built by Cambridge University academic Aleksandr Kogan which harvested the personal data of up to 87 million Facebook profiles without permission, during the US election, with this data then used to target specific voters, other applications, including one called sex compass, and another about music, could also have been used to scrape personal information.
Kaiser said: “These applications were designed specifically to harvest data from individuals using Facebook as the tool.”
She added: “It can be inferred or implied that there were many additional individuals as opposed to just those ones through Aleksandr Kogan’s test whose data may have been compromised.”
Kaiser also claimed CA, Leave.EU, Ukip and Eldon Insurance, a company owned by millionaire Brexiteer Arron Banks all shared data. She suggested people who had used one of Banks’s sites to search for insurance could then have had their details used by political parties or causes.
Leave.EU described Kaiser’s evidence as “lies and allegations”.
The Information Commissioners Office are currently investigating Banks and Leave.EU.
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