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Facebook
Inc.
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said it suspended Cambridge Analytica, a data firm that helped President
Donald Trump
with the 2016 election, after learning that it misled the social-media giant and violated its policy for handling user data.
Facebook said late Friday it been given information that Cambridge Analytica, along with two individuals who don’t work there, improperly kept Facebook user data for years despite telling the social network that it had destroyed those records. Facebook didn’t say how Cambridge Analytica used that data or if it gave the data to the Trump campaign.
Cambridge Analytica didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment late Friday.
Facebook, which didn’t elaborate on the source of its information, said it is suspending Cambridge Analytica, its parent Strategic Communication Laboratories, and the two individuals from buying ads or administering clients’ pages while it investigates the reports.
The move once again spotlights Facebook’s role during the 2016 presidential election and its shortcomings in policing manipulation and misuse of its platform.
Cambridge Analytica was a top vendor to Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign and has come under scrutiny in special counsel
Robert Mueller’s
investigation into whether Trump associates colluded with Russia’s efforts to interfere in the U.S. election. Mr. Trump has denied any collusion by his campaign with the Russians, and Moscow has denied meddling in the election.
Facebook said it had learned in 2015 that
Aleksandr Kogan,
a psychology professor at the University of Cambridge, broke its data policies when he shared user data gleaned from his personality-prediction app, “thisisyourdigitallife,” to third parties including Cambridge Analytica and
Christopher Wylie,
who runs a company called of Eunoia Technologies Inc.
About 270,000 people downloaded the app, giving Mr. Kogan access to information such as the cities they lived in, the content they had liked, or information about their friends, Facebook Deputy General Counsel Paul Grewal wrote in a blog post.
Mr. Kogan’s data gathering was permitted at the time, but he violated Facebook policy by sharing the data he compiled with outsiders. Facebook in 2015 removed his app and demanded that he and those he shared the data with certify that the data was destroyed, the company said.
Mr. Kogan didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment late Friday. Mr. Wylie couldn’t immediately be located.
A Facebook spokesman said the parties, including Cambridge Analytica, entered legal agreements on the deletion, but Facebook couldn’t independently verify that it was scrubbed. The company has since changed its data policies so developers can’t easily gather as much data about Facebook users, it said.
Facebook said it learned several days ago that not all the data was deleted.
“We are moving aggressively to determine the accuracy of these claims,” Mr. Grewal wrote Friday. “If true, this is another unacceptable violation of trust and the commitments they made.”
Facebook said it has previously taken similar action against other advertisers and developers, although a spokesman declined to describe any examples.
The Trump campaign paid Cambridge Analytica close to $9 million for data, polling and research services, according to Federal Election Commission records and a person familiar with additional payments that weren’t publicly disclosed.
Mr. Mueller in the fall asked Cambridge Analytica to turn over the emails of any of its employees who worked on the Trump campaign, in a sign that the special counsel is probing the campaign’s data operation, The Wall Street Journal reported in December.
Cambridge Analytica Chief Executive
Alexander Nix
has said he contacted WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange through his speaker’s bureau during the 2016 campaign to offer help organizing the
Hillary Clinton
-related emails the website planned to publish. WikiLeaks last year published a trove of Clinton-related emails that U.S. intelligence agencies later determined had been stolen by Russian intelligence and given to the website. Mr. Assange said he rejected Mr. Nix’s outreach.
Since the 2016 election, Cambridge Analytica largely has departed the American political consulting world. FEC records show it doesn’t have any U.S. political clients, as the data firm has grappled with staff upheaval and complaints from clients that it fell short in delivering services it promised. The firm has defended its work, saying political cycles mean its level of business fluctuates.
—Rebecca Ballhaus contributed to this article.
Write to Deepa Seetharaman at Deepa.Seetharaman@wsj.com
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ATMORE, Ala. — A man convicted of killing the woman who hired him to work with a traveling carnival nearly two decades ago was executed Thursday night after dropping his appeals and asking to be put to death.
Michael Wayne Eggers, 50, died at 7:29 p.m. CDT after receiving a lethal injection at a southwest Alabama prison.
He declined to give any last words, but briefly gave a thumbs-up signal to friends and family as the execution began. He was pronounced dead about 35 minutes after the death warrant was read.
Eggers was sentenced to death for the 2000 strangulation of his employer, Bennie Francis Murray. Prosecutors said Eggers admitted to strangling Murray during an argument after she hired him to work concessions for a traveling carnival. Her body was found in Walker County, northwest of Birmingham.
In 2016, following disagreements with his attorneys, Eggers dropped his appeals and asked Alabama to quickly schedule his execution. In a handwritten filing, he asked judges to allow his “immediate execution in the interests of truth, law and justice.”
His former attorneys asked the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene. They argued that Eggers suffered from schizophrenia and delusions and was mentally incompetent when he made the decision.
“Michael Eggers is severely mentally ill,” his former attorneys wrote in a petition filed with the U.S. Supreme Court.
His former attorneys argued that Eggers believed he was the subject of a government conspiracy and “would rather die than be represented by lawyers who do not support his delusional view of his case.”
Eggers opposed efforts by his former attorneys to stop the execution. The petition to the Supreme Court was made without his consent. A prison spokeswoman said Eggers requested that no attorneys be allowed to visit him, or witness the lethal injection. Eggers met with friends and family Thursday, but not attorneys.
The state attorney general’s office had asked the court to let the execution proceed.
The state argued that Eggers made a rational decision to drop his appeals. Lawyers for the state noted that the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in 2017 upheld a district court’s ruling that he was competent.
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