Why Facebook just suspended another data analytics firm

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Photo / Supplied

Facebook said it suspended a longtime partner that had used data from Facebook and other social networks to assist governments - including Russia, Turkey, and the US - in monitoring public sentiment, a more cautious approach in the wake of a data privacy scandal.

Facebook said it had found no evidence of wrongdoing by the Boston-based company, Crimson Hexagon, but it was curtailing the company's access to its data while it investigated the matter.

The pre-emptive move represents a shift for Facebook in the wake of the controversy over political consultancy Cambridge Analytica, which Facebook said inappropriately collected the private profiles of more than 80 million Facebook users. The social network is under investigation from three different federal agencies over its work with Cambridge Analytica and, since the crisis erupted, has suspended more than 200 apps which had access to Facebook data.

Crimson Hexagon, which primarily used public, aggregated data from people who made their profiles available for anyone to see, is the largest of this new wave of suspensions.

Crimson Hexagon chief technology officer Chris Bingham said in a statement Friday, "Crimson Hexagon is fully cooperating with Facebook who has publicly stated its investigation to date has found no wrongdoing."

The revelations were first reported by the Wall Street Journal.

The Journal cited documents which said that Crimson Hexagon worked with a Russian non-profit, the Civil Society Development Foundation, that had Kremlin ties and used the data to study the Russian people's opinion of the regime of President Vladimir Putin. The company also used Twitter's data feed, called a "Firehose," to assist in a decision to shut down Twitter during pro-democracy protests in 2014.

Facebook has stirred controversy before over whether its data was used to monitor people for undemocratic purposes. In 2016, The Washington Post reported that Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, had shared public data with a startup that helped law enforcement agencies track minority protesters in Baltimore, Maryland, and Ferguson, Missouri. Shortly after, Facebook changed its policies to prohibit its partners from using any data for "surveillance."

"We don't allow developers to build surveillance tools using information from Facebook or Instagram," Facebook said in a statement Friday. "We take these allegations seriously, and have suspended these apps while we investigate."

Twitter did not respond to a request for comment.

Twitter and Facebook both sell public data for what's known as 'sentiment analysis" or "social listening." The tech companies aggregate people's posts, comments, likes, locations, general demographic and other information into anonymous data feeds that many startups purchase in order to analyze and sell to clients, including corporations, brands, and governments.

Privacy advocates have raised concerns that sometimes data can be linked to individuals, particularly when it being used to monitor sentiment in real-time events, such as a concert or a protest.