With virtually no customers left, Cambridge Analytica shuts down
03 May 2018
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Cambridge Analytica, the British data firm that worked for President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, has shut down following allegations about misuse of Facebook data and the campaign tactics it pitched to clients.
In March, the company suspended its chief executive, Alexander Nix, and said it was launching an independent investigation to determine if the company engaged in any wrongdoing in its work on political campaigns.
Cambridge Analytica (CA) and its parent SCL Elections Ltd are shutting down immediately after suffering a sharp drop in business, the company said on Wednesday.
The company will begin bankruptcy proceedings in the UK and the US, it said, after losing clients and facing mounting legal fees resulting from the scandal over allegedly harvesting personal data about millions of Facebook users beginning in 2014.
“It has been determined that it is no longer viable to continue operating the business,” the company, accused of misusing tens of millions of Facebook users’ data, said in a statement.
"The siege of media coverage has driven away virtually all of the company's customers and suppliers," the statement said. "As a result, (there is) no realistic alternative to placing the company into administration."
Allegations of the improper use of data for 87 million Facebook users by Cambridge Analytica, which was hired by President Donald Trump's 2016 US election campaign, has hurt the shares of the Facebook, the world's biggest social network, and prompted multiple official investigations in the United States and Europe.
"Over the past several months, Cambridge Analytica has been the subject of numerous unfounded accusations and, despite the company's efforts to correct the record, has been vilified for activities that are not only legal, but also widely accepted as a standard component of online advertising in both the political and commercial arenas," the company's statement said.
The firm shut down effective Wednesday and employees have been told to turn in their computers, The Wall Street Journal reported.
CA claims it deleted data about Facebook users obtained in breach of the social network's terms of service. The company said it hired British barrister Julian Malins to conduct an independent investigation into the allegations, whose report it posted on its website on Wednesday.
“[The] report...concluded that the allegations were not ‘borne out by the facts’,” CA said, adding that it had “unwavering confidence that its employees have acted ethically and lawfully”.
Its board has appointed lawyers in Britain to oversee the insolvency process, and would be following suit in America, CA added.
The Cambridge Analytica sign had been removed from the reception area of its London offices on Wednesday, Reuters reported. At SCL's Washington, DC office, a man declined to answer questions from a Reuters reporter.
After the announcement, Britain's data regulator said it would continue civil and criminal investigations of the firm and will pursue "individuals and directors as appropriate" despite the shutdown.
"We will also monitor closely any successor companies using our powers to audit and inspect, to ensure the public is safeguarded," a spokeswoman for the Information Commissioner's Office said in a statement.
Cambridge Analytica was created around 2013 initially with a focus on US elections, with $15 million in backing from billionaire Republican donor Robert Mercer and a name chosen by future Trump White House adviser Steve Bannon, The New York Times reported.
CA marketed itself as a provider of consumer research, targeted advertising and other data-related services to both political and corporate clients.
After Trump won the White House in 2016, in part with the firm's help, Cambridge Analytica chief executive Alexander Nix went to more clients to pitch his services, The Times reported last year. The company boasted it could develop psychological profiles of consumers and voters which was a "secret sauce" it used to sway them more effectively than traditional advertising could.
One unanswered question in Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into whether there was any collusion between Trump's campaign and Russia is whether Russia's Internet Research Agency or Russian intelligence used data Cambridge Analytica obtained from Facebook or other sources to help target and time messages during the campaign that were anti-Hillary Clinton, pro-Trump and politically and racially divisive.
Bannon was a former vice president of the London-based firm, and Mueller has asked it to provide internal documents about how its data and analyses were used in the Trump campaign, according to Reuters’ sources.
