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Cambridge Analytica (CA) ‘will have to respond’ to the issues raised by the Indian government irrespective of its bankruptcy filing plans or closure of its business, senior government officials said.
“We will continue with the process. The liability existed before the company filing for bankruptcy, which is its own issue in many ways,” a top official at Ministry of Electronics and Information technology (MeitY), told BusinessLine on Thursday.
The UK-based data analytics and political consulting company has been under fire in various countries for allegedly harvesting data from almost 87 million Facebook users and leveraging them for political campaigns.
The Indian government was also concerned because of having the largest user base of Facebook and has shot-off notices to both Facebook and Cambridge Analytica in the recent past, confronting them with questions on data breach issue. It has sent two notices so far and has given a deadline of May 10 for both the companies to respond.
Speaking on condition of anonymity, another official said, “They (CA) have to respond to the issues raised by the Indian government. Liquidation or insolvency process does not bail them out of past liabilities. They have to clear the tasks they have been given.”
On Wednesday, CA announced its closure in a statement on its website and claimed it had been ‘vilified’ for activities that are legal and considered a standard component of online advertising. The company said it is shutting down due to a sharp drop in its business.
In its statement, CA has said, “Over the past several months, Cambridge Analytica has been the subject of numerous unfounded accusations and, despite the company’s efforts to correct the record, has been vilified for activities that are not only legal, but also widely accepted as a standard component of online advertising in both the political and commercial arenas.”
While Facebook had previously admitted that nearly 5.62 lakh people in India were potentially affected by the data breach incident, CA had claimed that it does not have any Facebook data on Indian citizens.
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