Daily News by Denis Slattery
November 21, 2019
ALBANY — A pair of prominent figures in the Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal will offer testimony Friday as state lawmakers explore ways to better protect New Yorkers against the harvesting and sale of personal data by tech giants including Google, Amazon and Facebook.
Brittany Kaiser, whistleblower and former business development director of the now-defunct British political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica, and David Carroll, an associate professor at Parsons School of Design and a prominent data privacy advocate, will talk to lawmakers in Manhattan about their role in exposing Cambridge Analytica’s illicit harvesting of personal data from Facebook and other sources.
“Privacy is a right that all of us have and currently with social media and big tech they’ve been just compiling a lot of data on us, making profiles, making money and exploiting all the information they have on us,” said Sen. Kevin Thomas (D-Nassau), who heads the Senate committee on Consumer Protection, Internet and Technology.
Kaiser first came forward with information about Cambridge Analytica’s shady business practices last year after another whistleblower went public about the company’s data harvesting.
Since then she has written a book and spent her time issuing warnings about data collection, whether it be private financial information being sold by credit rating agencies to data dealers, or social media and political consulting firms targeting customers with misleading or flat-out inaccurate information.
