Just a few hours after meeting French President Emmanuel Macron to discuss the ways in which the company can become more accountable for the content published on its platform, and just a few days after Facebook’s co-founder Chris Hughes slammed the company and its CEO for what they have become, the company quietly announced on Friday that another Cambridge Analytica may have come to light.
“Today Facebook filed a lawsuit in California state court against Rankwave, a South Korean data analytics company that ran apps on the Facebook platform,” the company announced, under the heading “Enforcing Our Platform Policies.”
TechCrunch obtained a copy of the lawsuit and said that it “centers around Rankwave offering to help businesses build a Facebook authorization step into their apps so they can pass all the user data to Rankwave, which then analyzes biographic and behavioral traits to supply user contact info and ad targeting assistance to the business.”
Rankwave’s business model has echoes of Cambridge Analytica, where personality quizzes were used to build complex algorithms that targeted users and their circles of friends with highly-targeted ads. These ads were designed to shape voting behavior, amongst other things.
Facebook has accused Rankwave of using more than 30 apps to track and analyze comments and likes. They also have an app to track the popularity of a user’s posts, calculating a ‘social influence score’. That app is still available on the Google Play Store at the time of writing.
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