Facebook investigates the uses of another data analysis company

Facebook has suspended applications from a data analysis company, Crimson Hexagon, to establish whether its contracts with the US government and a Russian non-profit organization violate the rules of the social network, reported Wall Street Newspaper.

This decision comes as Facebook has been entangled for several months in the scandal Cambridge Analytica, a British company accused of collecting and exploiting without their consent the personal data of users for political purposes, including to win the Brexit in the United Kingdom. United and Donald Trump in the United States.

Crimson Hexagon, an American company in Boston, says its platform allows its customers, including major US groups, to analyze their audience and study the perception of their brand.

According to the business daily, government contracts with this company, which exploits Facebook's public data, had not been previously approved by the social network.

Since 2014, US federal agencies have paid more than $ 800,000 to Crimson Hexagon for a total of 22 contracts, the Wall Street Journal adds in its article published Friday.

Crimson Hexagon has also sold its analytics platform overseas, including Turkey and Russia, where it worked in 2014 with a non-profit organization linked to the Russian government, the newspaper reports. According to him, the company has mistakenly received at least one private data from Instagram, a subsidiary of Facebook.

Facebook has asked Crimson Hexagon for more information. At this point, however, "based on our investigation, Crimson Hexagon has not obtained any information from Facebook or Instagram inappropriately," said a spokesman for the social network quoted by the daily.

A Boston company executive, Chris Bingham, wrote in a blog note on Friday that Crimson Hexagon only collects publicly available data on social media, which is "completely legal".

In the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Facebook acknowledged that the data of up to 87 million users had been hijacked by the British company, which was working in 2016 for Trump's campaign.

Following these revelations, the boss of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg had to explain at length to American and then European parliamentarians very strongly against the social network, accused of laxity and opacity in his management of the mountains of personal data he holds and that fuel his business model.