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A Facebook scientist tied to Cambridge Analytica has quietly left Facebook

The tech giant has not explained the departure of Joe Chancellor, who was hired after he helped harvest user profiles for the controversial data firm.

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A Facebook psychology researcher who previously helped harvest millions of Facebook users' profiles for the controversial Trump campaign contractor Cambridge Analytica has left the tech giant.

In December 2015, when it said it first learned that a pair of Cambridge University researchers had sold the harvested user data to the election firm, Facebook began an investigation and demanded the data be deleted. Around the same time, it also hired Joseph Chancellor, one of the two researchers.

On Wednesday, a Facebook spokesperson declined to explain when or why Chancellor had left the company, or to detail the results of any investigation into his work. "I can confirm that Joseph Chancellor is no longer employed by Facebook, and we wish him all the best," she wrote in an email. Chancellor, whom the company said worked as a quantitative researcher on its User Experience Research team, did not respond to a request for comment.

Facebook has said little in response to lawmakers' questions about Chancellor, who was also not mentioned on Wednesday when Senators questioned Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg at a hearing on Capitol Hill. The company has not publicly held any employee accountable for the Cambridge Analytica episode, but after it became front page news, Chancellor was put on leave by Facebook as it investigated his role, reported in May. As recently as June, the company said that it was still "investigating Mr. Chancellor's prior work" according to written responses to Senators' questions.

On Sunday, first reported that Facebook "no longer employs Chancellor," in an addendum to an April story about his senior collaborator Aleksander Kogan, the Cambridge University lecturer who has become a focus of the controversy. Kogan and Cambridge Analytica were suspended from Facebook for violating its terms of service in March, when a whistleblower revealed that the Facebook data had, in fact, not been deleted. Chancellor, however, still retains a Facebook account and, as of Wednesday, a company webpage. By Thursday afternoon, that page was no longer active. ( The New Yorker also confirmed Chancellor's departure on Thursday.)

Kogan, who himself has previously collaborated with Facebook on research, officially led the data harvest. But he said he "did everything with" Chancellor. The two were co-founders and equal co-owners of Global Science Research, or GSR, the company that Cambridge Analytica hired to gather the user data and analyze it for psychological traits.

The exact nature of Chancellor's work at Facebook is not clear. The company employs many in-house social scientists to better understand the psychology of its users using an unprecedented amount of data. When he was hired at Facebook Research in November 2015, according to a now deleted LinkedIn profile, Chancellor had been researching happiness and so-called pro-social behavior. At some point, he was assigned to virtual reality research, a hot topic for the Oculus-owning tech giant.

In April 2017, The Intercept was the first to report on Chancellor's role at Facebook. At the time, the company said in a statement: "The work that he did previously has no bearing on the work that he does at Facebook." As for Cambridge Analytica, Facebook told The Intercept then that it believed the harvested data had been deleted, and that an ongoing investigation had "not uncovered anything that suggests wrongdoing."

Facebook officials have also not made clear when it became aware of his role at GSR or that he had violated its terms of service. The company also has not said what it may have learned from him about the data harvest, either before or after the scandal erupted. Correspondence between Kogan and Facebook in 2014 that has been released to the British Parliament does not mention Chancellor. But in an interview with , Kogan said that Chancellor had informed the company of his role at GSR in 2015 while he was being interviewed for the Facebook position.

During testimony before a Parliamentary committee investigating fake news and data in elections in April, Facebook's chief technology officer Mike Schroepfer initially said Facebook had only learned of Chancellor's role in 2017. Later in the hearing, he revised his answer. "In the recruiting process, people hiring him probably saw a CV and may have known he was part of GSR," said Schroepfer. "Is it possible that someone knew about this and the right other people in the organization didn't know about it? That is possible."

Damian Collins, the chair of the committee, noted the difficulty of Facebook's position when he questioned Kogan that month.

"When Facebook's response from their deputy general counsel described your work as 'a scam and a fraud' ... and they singled you out to say that 'you'd lied to us and violated our platform policies,' those remarks must apply to Joseph Chancellor as well," Collins said.

Related: Facebook reinstated a data firm with ties to its election study that had raised spying concerns

When asked about the matter in May, a spokesperson for Facebook said that the company didn't know about Chancellor's role at GSR at the time he was hired.

"Joseph works in our VR team, and there are probably dozens of other Cambridge University grads that work here at Facebook," the spokesperson said in a phone call. "When we found out about Kogan's app back in 2015, and the fact that they might be sharing data with Cambridge Analytica, we didn't know about Chancellor's involvement, because Kogan identified himself as the sole developer of the app itself, and didn't disclose [Chancellor's] involvement."

Kogan, who also goes by the last name Spectre, did not respond to requests for comment. He signed a non-disclosure agreement with Facebook in 2016 related to the issue, but Facebook has told lawmakers it has since released him from that agreement. Facebook said in May that Chancellor hadn't signed an NDA connected to the data harvest, but since he joined Facebook, he has been bound by an employee confidentiality agreement.

Unanswered questions

While at Cambridge University, where Chancellor worked as a postdoctoral student in Kogan's psychology lab, the two formed Global Science Research. They built and distributed Facebook apps that offered users personality predictions, based on pioneering research using Facebook "likes" at the university's Psychometrics Center. In exchange, users would be turning over their personal data and more limited information about their friends-including their "likes" and in some cases their private messages-if their settings allowed it.

Just weeks after founding the company in May 2014, the researchers accepted a contract for $800,000 from Cambridge Analytica to cover costs related to the apps-including paying users $1 to $2 dollars to install them-and to produce data on most American Facebook users and their psychometric scores. They managed to amass information from more than 87 million profiles, even though less than 1% of those people installed the apps to begin with.

Chancellor and Kogan were equal partners at GSR, but Chancellor resigned his directorship in September 2015, company records indicate. Chancellor began his job at Facebook that November, and The Guardian first reported on the data harvest the following month, which is when Facebook says it first learned of the data harvest.

Concerns about GSR's work first emerged in 2014 at the university. Other researchers there had made a separate tranche of Facebook data available to Kogan and Chancellor "explicitly for academic research purposes only." But Michal Kosinski, who was then deputy director of the university's Psychometrics Center, told Fast Company last November that he couldn't be sure that the center's own data hadn't been improperly used by GSR.

"Alex and Joe collected their own data," Kosinski wrote in an email. "It is possible that they stole our data, but they also spent several hundred thousand [ recruiting participants on Amazon's] Mechanical Turk and data providers-enough to collect much more than what is available in our sample."

Kogan, whose contract with Cambridge University expires this month, has insisted no academic data was used by GSR. He has also complained of having been "scapegoated" by Facebook, which he said knew what he and Chancellor were doing at the time and had effectively permitted "thousands" of other apps to similarly harvest data.

A university spokesperson said it continues to investigate the issue and has contacted Facebook requesting "all relevant evidence in their possession."

Read more: How Amazon Helped Cambridge Analytica Harvest Americans' Facebook Data

Cambridge Analytica, with backing from the billionaire Mercer family and Steve Bannon, helped run the Trump campaign's social media effort alongside representatives from Facebook- so-called campaign "embeds." SCL Group, Cambridge's parent company, has said the Facebook data wasn't used during its work for Trump, and some analysts have said the company's analysis was largely useless. But its role in elections is now the subject of multiple investigations, and amid the scrutiny, executives have said they are closing the firm.

Facebook, which also faces investigations by the Federal Trade Commission and the Security and Exchange Commission, has since overhauled the systems and policies that allowed Chancellor and Kogan to amass torrents of data, and it has also sought to stem false news, discriminatory ad targeting, and hateful content. But these problems-and Facebook's subsequent responses-helps illustrate some of the risks that users will continue to face online, and the apparent difficulties internet giants have when it comes to preventing abuse on their platforms.

Chancellor's fate is now clearer, if not his precise role, but lawmakers, whose patience and technological understanding has already been stretched thin, have many other questions for the social network. As it faces Europe's General Data Protection Regulation and a new privacy law in California, Facebook and other tech companies are starting to push for a federal law that better meets their wishes. That effort is likely to be shaped by how Facebook answers those lingering questions, even ones as seemingly minuscule as those about a single researcher.
This story has been updated to reflect Facebook's removal on Thursday of Chancellor's company homepage, to mention the New Yorker's report, and to specify Facebook's minimal answers to lawmakers' questions about him.

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A Facebook scientist tied to Cambridge Analytica has quietly left Facebook

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A Facebook psychology researcher who previously helped harvest millions of Facebook users' profiles for the controversial Trump campaign contractor Cambridge Analytica has left the tech giant. In December 2015, when it said it first learned that a pair of Cambridge University researchers had sold the harvested user data to the election firm, Facebook began an investigation and demanded the data be deleted.

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Uncertainty is widespread across companies over who takes the lead on cyber security, according to Willis Towers Watson

Different organisations place the responsibility of cyber security at the feet of different roles. This depends on the type of organisation, its culture and size.

This idea is confirmed by a Global Economist Intelligence Unit survey, sponsored by Willis Towers Watson, which found that there is a variety of approaches on how leadership implements cyber resiliency across their organisations.

Stronger communication and collaboration is needed across all various cyber security functions and practices, including between the board and the CTO or CISO.

The cyber security responsibility

With the increase of more stringent data regulations - like GDPR and California Consumer Privacy Act - and the widespread media coverage of data breaches, the impetus on cyber security has never been so high. Poor security practice will now inevitably lead to a breach, which will in turn cause financial loss and reputational damage. Corporate heads will also roll.
>Read more on Cyber security best practice
The problem is that the majority of executives around the world feel they face a "specialist-generalist" dilemma as to whom leads on cyber resiliency, according to the survey from Willis Towers Watson. This is because, the challenge of security is company-wide, but whoever is in charge of it needs specific, up-to-date cyber training. Are these business-focused, cyber-savvy, "specialist-generalist" individuals in short supply?

Ultimately, there is a huge disparity across organisations as to who should be responsible for cyber security. The survey of over 450 companies found that almost 40% of executives felt that the board should oversee cyber, compared with 24% who felt it should be the role of a specialised cyber committee. This would presumably be overseen by the CTO or CISO. A small portion of respondents surveyed believed it should be the responsibility of audit, risk or some other subgroup.

"When you dig into the details of a breach you will find warnings from the information security team well before the problem is finally exposed," said Stephen Moore, Chief Security Strategist at Exabeam. "Most of these warnings are ignored. The real question is why is that?"

"It's often said that security is everyone's responsibility and academically the CISO has the authority, both are lies. Organisationally, we should worry less about responsibility and more about barriers to success. The responsible owner is the person or team who can best enact the qualified recommendations of the security team. Often the threat isn't the adversary, it's the lack of internal support, warnings being buried, and even the fear of outages that creates the conditions for failure."
>Read more on Cyber security training
"Recommendations should be tied observable failures to prevent, detect, or disrupt attacks - not things like workbook-based audit findings. The ownership and delivery of cyber security in an organisation must be owned outside of the IT department."

Tim Brown, VP of Security at SolarWinds MSP, agreed and said that cyber security isn't the responsibility of one department. Security needs to be built into how a business operates.

"From finance, to HR, to marketing, to operations - everyone needs to be a good cyber steward. It's really all hands on deck to make sure the entire organisation is adhering to the right protocols, practicing good cyberhygiene, and understanding how their specific job plays into the cyber landscape."

Cyber security challenge

The main challenge, hindering the decision of who is responsible for cyber security, is a lack of communication within leadership roles.

Alarmingly, or perhaps unfairly, only 8% of executives said that their CISO or equivalent performs above average in communicating the financial, workforce, reputational or personal consequences of cyber threats. At the same time, under 15% go executives gave their CISOs or equivalent a top rating from a scale of one to ten.
>Read more on Cyber security - the unrelenting challenge for readership
"It is no surprise that one of the main challenges companies face when implementing a cyber risk mitigation or resiliency plan is the communication gap between the board and the CISO," said Anthony Dagostino, global head of cyber risk with Willis Towers Watson.

"Cyber resiliency starts with the board because they understand risk and can help their organizations set the appropriate strategy to effectively mitigate that risk. However, while CISOs are security specialists, most of them still struggle with adequately translating security threats into operational and financial impact to their organisations - which is what boards want to understand."

"To close this communication gap, CISOs [or CTOs] need tools that can help them quantify and translate the vulnerabilities uncovered from their cybersecurity maturity assessments. These tools enable them to better communicate the risk to the board, seek adequate budget, and enable the board to provide meaningful guidance."

Cyber security budget

Enterprise security budgets depend on the size of the organisation and the type of industry they are a part of. In general, funds dedicated to security move between 3% and 15% of an IT budget.

"With enterprises, the budget is often shared across many different departments and the budget can be fairly significant depending on their specific needs," said Brown.
>Read more on Worldwide enterprise security spending
"With affordable and scalable outsourcing options available through today's managed service providers, security certainly doesn't have to break the bank to be effective and even smaller businesses can ensure they're doing these types of basics. Couple that with the idea that security should be viewed as a ubiquitous function of the organisation, and you've got a great foundation."

"The budget allocation depends on your companies appetite for risk - most companies will be aware of attacks on their business, many will have put estimates of the financial cost to loss of business and reputational damage it can cause," according to Terry Storrar, Sales Director, End User Sales at MCSA Group.

"Over the last few days British Airways revealed details of a breech and that they are prepared to repay any financial losses incurred by their customers, the cost in financial terms is often dwarfed by the ongoing damage to the company's reputation. Companies need to have the right level of systems security for their business, a detailed and practiced business recovery plan and a process that kicks into action so that in the event of an attack their business continuity strategy is implemented and minimises the risks to their customers and to their business."

More budget: Better security?

More budget doesn't mean better security, according to Moore. "Money alone won't save a company; the organisational co-operation must match budget, otherwise security maturity and efficacy will not change."

"If placed within the IT organisation, information security will operate in a conflict of interests. Security requires reactive corrections to flawed environments. Corrections always come at an operational cost, often in the form of an outage. IT works on performance and availability, and cares little for security - especially if it erodes their two favourite metrics - often tied to their bonus dollars."

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Who is responsible for cyber security in the enterprise?

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Uncertainty is widespread across companies over who takes the lead on cyber security, according to Willis Towers Watson Different organisations place the responsibility of cyber security at the feet of different roles. This depends on the type of organisation, its culture and size.

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Trends

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Artificial intelligence, immersive experiences, digital twins, event-thinking and continuous adaptive security create a foundation for the next generation of digital business models and ecosystems.

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Explore the latest: Your Detailed Guide to Gartner Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends 2023

How do designers make cars safer? They treat them like a school of fish. Safe Swarm, recently unveiled by Honda, uses vehicle-to-vehicle communication to allow cars to pass information on to other cars in the vicinity. For example, alerts about an accident miles up the road could be relayed to cars miles back, enabling them to operate collaboratively and intelligently to avoid accidents and mitigate traffic.

The evolution of intelligent things, such as collective thinking car swarms, is one of 10 strategic trends with broad industry impact and significant potential for disruption.

"The continuing digital business evolution exploits new digital models to align more closely the physical and digital worlds for employees, partners and customers," says David Cearley, vice president and Gartner Fellow, at Gartner 2017 Symposium/ITxpo in Orlando, Florida. "Technology will be embedded in everything in the digital business of the future."

The intelligent digital mesh

Gartner calls the entwining of people, devices, content and services the intelligent digital mesh. It's enabled by digital models, business platforms and a rich, intelligent set of services to support digital business.

Intelligent: How AI is seeping into virtually every technology and with a defined, well-scoped focus can allow more dynamic, flexible and potentially autonomous systems.

Digital: Blending the virtual and real worlds to create an immersive digitally enhanced and connected environment.

Mesh: The connections between an expanding set of people, business, devices, content and services to deliver digital outcomes.

Intelligent

Trend No. 1: AI foundation

The ability to use AI to enhance decision making, reinvent business models and ecosystems, and remake the customer experience will drive the payoff for digital initiatives through 2025.

Given the steady increase in inquiry calls, it's clear that interest is growing. A recent Gartner survey showed that 59% of organizations are still gathering information to build their AI strategies, while the remainder have already made progress in piloting or adopting AI solutions.

Although using AI correctly will result in a big digital business payoff, the promise (and pitfalls) of general AI where systems magically perform any intellectual task that a human can do and dynamically learn much as humans do is speculative at best. Narrow AI, consisting of highly scoped machine-learning solutions that target a specific task (such as understanding language or driving a vehicle in a controlled environment) with algorithms chosen that are optimized for that task, is where the action is today. "Enterprises should focus on business results enabled by applications that exploit narrow AI technologies and leave general AI to the researchers and science fiction writers," says Cearley.

Trend No. 2: Intelligent apps and analytics

Over the next few years every app, application and service will incorporate AI at some level. AI will run unobtrusively in the background of many familiar application categories while giving rise to entirely new ones. AI has become the next major battleground in a wide range of software and service markets, including aspects of ERP. "Challenge your packaged software and service providers to outline how they'll be using AI to add business value in new versions in the form of advanced analytics, intelligent processes and advanced user experiences," notes Cearley.

Intelligent apps also create a new intelligent intermediary layer between people and systems and have the potential to transform the nature of work and the structure of the workplace, as seen in virtual customer assistants and enterprise advisors and assistants.

"Explore intelligent apps as a way of augmenting human activity, and not simply as a way of replacing people," says Cearley. Augmented analytics is a particularly strategic growing area that uses machine learning for automating data preparation, insight discovery and insight sharing for a broad range of business users, operational workers and citizen data scientists.

Trend No. 3: Intelligent things

Intelligent things use AI and machine learning to interact in a more intelligent way with people and surroundings. Some intelligent things wouldn't exist without AI, but others are existing things (i.e., a camera) that AI makes intelligent (i.e., a smart camera.) These things operate semiautonomously or autonomously in an unsupervised environment for a set amount of time to complete a particular task. Examples include a self-directing vacuum or autonomous farming vehicle. As the technology develops, AI and machine learning will increasingly appear in a variety of objects ranging from smart healthcare equipment to autonomous harvesting robots for farms.

As intelligent things proliferate, expect a shift from stand-alone intelligent things to a swarm of collaborative intelligent things. In this model, multiple devices will work together, either independently or with human input. The leading edge of this area is being used by the military, which is studying the use of drone swarms to attack or defend military targets. It's evident in the consumer world in the opening example showcased at CES, the consumer electronics event.

Digital

Trend No. 4: Digital twins

A digital twin is a digital representation of a real-world entity or system. In the context of IoT, digital twins are linked to real-world objects and offer information on the state of the counterparts, respond to changes, improve operations and add value. With an estimated 21 billion connected sensors and endpoints by 2020, digital twins will exist for billions of things in the near future. Potentially billions of dollars of savings in maintenance repair and operation (MRO) and optimized IoT asset performance are on the table, says Cearley.

In the short term, digital twins offer help with asset management, but will eventually offer value in operational efficiency and insights into how products are used and how they can be improved.

Outside of the IoT, there is a growing potential to link digital twins to entities that are not simply "things." "Over time, digital representations of virtually every aspect of our world will be connected dynamically with their real-world counterparts and with one another and infused with AI-based capabilities to enable advanced simulation, operation and analysis," says Cearley. "City planners, digital marketers, healthcare professionals and industrial planners will all benefit from this long-term shift to the integrated digital twin world." For example, future models of humans could offer biometric and medical data, and digital twins for entire cities will allow for advanced simulations.

Trend No. 5: Cloud to the edge

Edge computing describes a computing topology in which information processing and content collection and delivery are placed closer to the sources of this information. Connectivity and latency challenges, bandwidth constraints and greater functionality embedded at the edge favors distributed models. Enterprises should begin using edge design patterns in their infrastructure architectures - particularly for those with significant IoT elements. A good starting point could be using colocation and edge-specific networking capabilities.

While it's common to assume that cloud and edge computing are competing approaches, it's a fundamental misunderstanding of the concepts. Edge computing speaks to a computing topology that places content, computing and processing closer to the user/things or "edge" of the networking. Cloud is a system where technology services are delivered using internet technologies, but it does not dictate centralized or decentralized service delivering services. When implemented together, cloud is used to create the service-oriented model and edge computing offers a delivery style that allows for executions of disconnected aspects of cloud service.

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cio technology and innovation leadership

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Gartner Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends For 2018

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Explore the latest: Your Detailed Guide to Gartner Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends 2023 How do designers make cars safer? They treat them like a school of fish. Safe Swarm, recently unveiled by Honda, uses vehicle-to-vehicle communication to allow cars to pass information on to other cars in the vicinity.