Facebook employees were concerned about Cambridge Analytica’s data collection as early as September 2015. That’s more than two months before the scandal came out, and earlier than the company always insisted it knew about the scandal.
This is apparent from a document that Facebook was obliged to put online by the US Department of Justice. The blog post containing the document in question, which cannot be found on the homepage of Facebook’s ‘news room’, is called ‘Document Holds the Potential for Confusion’. The document contains a long string of emails between two Facebook employees. They already mentioned Cambridge Analytica by name in September 2015, and around that time also expressed their concerns about the company’s practices.
The company is first mentioned on September 22. One employee then writes to another that ‘a dubious (at the very least) data model company has deeply penetrated our market’. The employees mention more companies that, like Cambridge Analytica, managed to collect a lot of user data in a dubious way. However, Cambridge Analytica was “the largest and most aggressive on the conservative side,” the staff said. A week later, another employee responds by saying that “he suspects that this company’s data collection is probably against the rules.” The latter is said again on October 13.
The Facebook employees also cite other companies that collect user data in questionable ways. On December 11, staff members again specifically speak about Cambridge Analytica, this time because it ‘has now become a PR issue’. They are referring to the reporting by The Guardian, which revealed the scandal surrounding the company for the first time around that date. As a result, Cambridge Analytica would have suddenly become ‘high priority’ in the company.
It is not clear what knowledge Mark Zuckerberg had of Cambridge Analytica’s practices at the time. Earlier, the company stated, among other things, before an investigative committee of the US Congress that it had already received signals that automatically and unnecessarily much data was being collected. However, those reports were not confirmed at the time. According to the company, the current documents also do not show that it was clear to Facebook that Cambridge Analytica collected more data than expected.