Developer of CA Facebook app says he is ‘scapegoat’ in row

London : The academic behind an app that harvested data from millions of Facebook users said Wednesday he was being scapegoated in an online privacy row that has rocked the social media giant.

British data firm Cambridge Analytica (CA) and Facebook are accused of improperly using the data for US President Donald Trump’s election 2016 campaign.

The scandal, which has seen the suspension of CA’s chief executive, wiped out $60 billion of Facebook’s market value since the start of the week, Bloomberg news reported Wednesday.

However, both firms have denied any wrongdoing and instead blamed the app’s inventor, Aleksandr Kogan, for misusing the information.

But Kogan hit back Wednesday, saying that CA had assured him his activities were “perfectly legal and within the terms of service” of Facebook.

“I’m being basically used as a scapegoat by both Facebook and Cambridge Analytica,” he said.

“We thought we were acting perfectly appropriately. We thought we were doing something that was really normal.

“We were assured by Cambridge Analytica that everything was perfectly legal and within the terms of service.”

The University of Cambridge psychologist behind the personality survey This Is Your Digital Life told the BBC that around 200,000 people used his app and around 30 million US Facebook users’ details were harvested.

The app’s vast reach beyond its users happened by scooping up data from their friends on Facebook, which says the data was taken without its knowledge.

Kogan said CA approached him to do the work, but did not know how the firm would use the personal data collected, leaving him “stunned” by the allegations against him.

Kogan said he strongly regretted not asking more questions about the work he did for CA.

“One of the great mistakes I did here was I just didn’t ask enough questions,” he said.

“I had never done a commercial project, I didn’t really have any reason to doubt their sincerity.

He added: “My motivation was to get a dataset I could do research on; I have never profited from this in any way personally.”