The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) in India on Friday (January 22) filed a case against the political consulting firm, Cambridge Analytica for illegal harvesting of personal data of 5.62 lakh Facebook users in the country. In the same case, the CBI also named Global Science Research Ltd.
A report by the news agency ANI said, "CBI registers a case against Cambridge Analytica and Global Science Research Ltd for "illegal harvesting of personal data from Facebook users in India"."
Many media platforms from all over the world in March 2018 brought to everyone's notice how the UK-based firm was used for harvesting private information of over 50 million Facebook users without their permission across the globe.
Union Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad in July 2018 told the Parliament that a CBI probe would take place into the data theft case involving Facebook and Cambridge Analytica.
Cambridge Analytica is a political consulting firm from the UK that was started in 2013. The Facebook-Cambridge Analytica controversy suggested that hundreds of elections in the world were influenced through such data harvesting.
The CBI had initiated its investigation into the case involving Cambridge Analytica and Global Science Research back in 2018 on account of alleged illegal harvesting of personal data of Indian users on Facebook. Facebook, which is one of the world's biggest social media platforms, had said that the British data analytics company might have misused the data of as many as 87 million Facebook users. Facebook had suggested that data of more than five lakh Indian users was compromised in this case.
The breach was carried out after 335 Facebook users from India downloaded an app that further sold their information to Cambridge Analytica.
Though the app was authorised to collect some user data for research purposes as per the policy of Facebook, it collected unauthorised data such as pages liked, private chats, demographic information, among other things illegally, according to the findings of the CBI.
