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The story of Kogan’s commercial ventures reveals a world where companies traded in the currency of personal data. As Kogan declined to speak on the record with the Guardian for this article, this account is based on public records, interviews with Kogan’s associates, and emails seen by the Guardian.
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It would be another year before the Guardian published an article revealing that Cambridge Analytica was using the Facebook data to target voters for Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign.
In the meantime, Kogan continued to work with the Facebook data, both for academic research and for GSR, which had a website promoting its tools to “optimise marketing strategies with the power of big data and psychological sciences”. He maintained a close relationship with Facebook, which provided him with an anonymised, aggregate dataset of 57 billion Facebook friendships for research purposes. He told 60 Minutes: “I even did a consulting project with Facebook in November of 2015, and what I was teaching them was lessons I learned from working with this dataset that we had collected for Cambridge Analytica, so I was explaining, ‘Here’s kinda what we did, and here’s what we learned, and here’s how you could apply it internally to help you with surveys and survey predictions and things like that.’”
