British privacy watchdog raids Cambridge Analytica

The British privacy watchdog ICO has received permission from the judge to raid Cambridge Analytica. The raid on the company, which collected Facebook data from 50 million users, took place Friday evening.

During the raid, about 20 employees of the Information Commissioner’s Office entered Cambridge Analytica’s London headquarters, according to NOS. The BBC writes that the raid began around 8 a.m. local time, less than an hour after the judge’s approval.

The raid continued well into the night. After about seven hours, the workers came out again with collected materials and left in a van. It is not yet clear to what extent useful evidence has been gathered.

Cambridge Analytica was discredited last week after it emerged that the company had collected the data of 50 million Facebook users. With this data, it would have created profiles of these users, which could have been used during Trump’s 2016 election campaign.

The company used an application called thisisyourdigitallife. Several hundred thousand people have used this app, but information was also collected from their Facebook friends, enabling the collection of 50 million user profiles.

In response to the news, Facebook has suspended Cambridge Analytica and reduced access to user data for apps and games. Some companies have reacted negatively and removed their ads from Facebook. Elon Musk has deleted Tesla and SpaceX’s Facebook pages in their entirety. The European Parliament is also investigating the matter.