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Cambridge Analytica Wasn’t Involved in Brexit Campaign, ICO Says

Cambridge Analytica wasn’t involved in the Brexit campaign, U.K.’s Information Commissioner’s Office says.

Cambridge Analytica Wasn’t Involved in Brexit Campaign, ICO Says
An umbrella featuring the design of the Union flag, also known as the Union Jack, stands near European Union flags outside the Houses of Parliment in London, U.K. (Photographer: Chris J. Ratcliffe/Bloomberg)

Cambridge Analytica, the defunct U.K. consulting company accused of using secretly mined Facebook Inc. data for targeted political advertising, wasn’t involved in the Brexit campaign, according to report by the U.K.’s Information Commissioner’s Office.

Information Commissioner Elizabeth Denham said in a blog post Wednesday that the investigation into to the use of personal data in political campaigning had concluded. In an Oct. 2 letter to a Parliamentary committee she said that Cambridge Analytica wasn’t involved in the 2016 EU referendum beyond some initial inquiries.

The secretly harvested Facebook data, according to Denham, couldn’t have been used in the Brexit referendum because it was focused on U.S. voters. There was some evidence that Global Science Research, the company that obtained data from Facebook users and their friends through a quiz app, and SCL Group, Cambridge Analytica’s parent company, were thinking to target U.K. voters through the same process, but that plan appeared not to have been pursued, according to Denham’s report.

Facebook last year reached a historic $5 billion deal with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission to settle an investigation into its privacy practices stemming from the Cambridge Analytica scandal that came to light in early 2018.

The U.K. fined Facebook 500,000 pounds ($646,000) in connection with ICO’s investigation.

“Our action led to fines paid by Vote Leave, Leave.EU, Emma’s Diary and Facebook, the latter given the maximum financial penalty we could levy under the law of the time,” Denham said. “Had Cambridge Analytica continued trading, we would also have looked to act against their poor data practices.”

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