As U.S. politicians call for Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to testify before Congress to get a better handle on how Cambridge Analytica may have affected the 2016 presidential election, British authorities are not wasting any time, launching a raid to get their hands on documents on hand at the firm’s offices (like private emails from foreign politicians).
On Friday, the UK’s High Court granted a warrant to enforcement officers working for the country’s information commissioner to conduct a search at Cambridge Analytica’s London headquarters.
Information Commissioner Elizabeth Denham has said she was looking at whether personal data was acquired in “an unauthorized way,” whether there was sufficient consent to share the data, what was done to safeguard it and whether Facebook acted robustly when it found out about the loss of the data.
The firm’s acting CEO, Alexander Tyler, said Cambridge Analytica was prepared to fully cooperate with the investigation. The firm maintains that none of the Facebook data that it harvested was used during the 2016 Presidential Election or Brexit.
Earlier this week, Tyler said that the firm had deleted the data from Facebook users it had harvested, but was empowering a third-party audit to see if that was actually true.