Controversial data mining company collected information on at least 87 million Facebook users. LONDON -- Cambridge Analytica created its own Facebook quizzes and questionnaires to collect reams of data on users using the social networking giant, according to a former senior official at the data mining company. Brittany Kaiser, the former director of program development at Cambridge Analytica, told British lawmakers on Tuesday that the company, which is at the center of a broader Facebook data scandal, widely used such practices, including a "sex compass" quiz, to garner insight on people's online habits. These data-collection strategies made it highly likely that more people's Facebook data had been collected without their knowledge than previously thought, according to Kaiser. Cambridge Analytica is already accused of using a third-party app created by Aleksandr Kogan, a Cambridge University professor, to collect online information on up to 87 million Facebook users.

Brittany Kaiser, a former Cambridge Analytica employee, testified today in front of a UK committee that's investigating the misuse of Facebook users' personal data. Kaiser claimed in her spoken and written testimony that Cambridge Analytica used other quizzes, such as the "'sex compass' quiz," to gather users' data. Kaiser did not have information on the specific quizzes that Cambridge Analytica used, but her statement makes clear that "This Is Your Digital Life" was not the only quiz that the company utilized to scrape Facebook data. Her written statement claims that Cambridge Analytica was not up front with Facebook in regard to the data it had. For example, she notes that Cambridge Analytica data scientists appeared to be using Facebook data two months after the company told Facebook that said data had been deleted.

Senator John N. Kennedy of Louisiana criticized Facebook's user agreement during Mark Zuckerberg's Senate hearing. Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., listens to testimony during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Capitol Hill, Dec. 6, 2017 in Washington, D.C. (Photo: Drew Angerer, Getty Images) WASHINGTON – Senators introduced a bipartisan bill Thursday that would give Americans greater power to protect their online privacy. The day before, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified to Congress about the misuse of user data on the social media site. "The data breach at Facebook showed the world that the digital promised land is not all milk and honey," said Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., who co-sponsored the bill with Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn. "I don't want to regulate Facebook half to death, but there are things that need to be changed."

We recently announced a new version of Excel Add-in which lets you perform state-of-the-art text analysis capabilities from the comforts of your spreadsheets without writing a single line of code. The add-in has been received very well by users working across different industry verticals like Market Research, Software, Consumer Goods, Education, etc. solving a variety of use-cases. Sentiment analysis has been the most used function of our Excel add-in closely followed by Emotion detection. Many of our users use sentiment analysis in Excel to quickly and accurately analyze the responses of their open-ended surveys, online chatter around their product/service or to analyze product reviews from e-commerce sites. In this blog post, we will discuss how to use the function Sentiment Analysis in Excel Add-in to do text analytics for any type of content.

Facebook pays millions of dollars every year to researchers and bug hunters to stamp out security holes in its products and infrastructure, but following Cambridge Analytica scandal, the company today launched a bounty program to reward users for reporting "data abuse" on its platform. The move comes as Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg prepares to testify before Congress this week amid scrutiny over the data sharing controversy surrounding Cambridge Analytica, a political consultancy firm that obtained and misused data on potentially 87 million of its users. Through its new "Data Abuse Bounty" program, Facebook would ask users to help the social media giant find app developers misusing data, Facebook announced Tuesday. Similar to its existing bug bounty program, the Data Abuse Bounty program will reward a sum of money to anyone who reports valid events of data collection that violate Facebook's revamped data policies. "This program is complementary to our existing bug bounty program in that it'follows the data' even if the root cause isn't a security flaw in Facebook's code," the company explains.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has endured a gruelling five-hour hearing before the US House of Representatives, facing tough questions about how the site protects user data, whether it is biased against certain users – and what, exactly, it is. The second day of questioning before the House Committee on Energy and Commerce proved more taxing for the 33-year-old than his testimony before two Senate committees on Tuesday. Representatives shot rapid-fire questions at the entrepreneur, and even interrupted his answers at several points. "While Facebook has certainly grown, I worry it has not matured," Representative Greg Walden said at the opening of the hearing on Wednesday. "I think it is time to ask whether Facebook may have moved too fast and broken too many things."

The web contains countless semi-structured websites, which can be a rich source of information for populating knowledge bases. Existing methods for extracting relations from the DOM trees of semi-structured webpages can achieve high precision and recall only when manual annotations for each website are available. Although there have been efforts to learn extractors from automatically-generated labels, these methods are not sufficiently robust to succeed in settings with complex schemas and information-rich websites. In this paper we present a new method for automatic extraction from semi-structured websites based on distant supervision. We automatically generate training labels by aligning an existing knowledge base with a web page and leveraging the unique structural characteristics of semi-structured websites. We then train a classifier based on the potentially noisy and incomplete labels to predict new relation instances. Our method can compete with annotation-based techniques in the literature in terms of extraction quality. A large-scale experiment on over 400,000 pages from dozens of multi-lingual long-tail websites harvested 1.25 million facts at a precision of 90%.

A laptop showing the Facebook logo is held alongside a Cambridge Analytica sign at the entrance to the London offices of Cambridge Analytica. The company's acting CEO, Alexander Tayler, is stepping down, and is the second CEO out since the data sharing scandal broke. A laptop showing the Facebook logo is held alongside a Cambridge Analytica sign at the entrance to the London offices of Cambridge Analytica. The company's acting CEO, Alexander Tayler, is stepping down, and is the second CEO out since the data sharing scandal broke. The acting chief executive officer of Cambridge Analytica, the political data firm embroiled in controversy after improperly sharing data from some 87 million Facebook users, has stepped down.

Mark Zuckerberg's own personal data was taken as part of Facebook's data abuse scandal, he has said. He made the confession during Congress hearings, where US lawmakers quizzed the Facebook boss on how it was responding to claims it had unethically abused data about its users. The admission means that organisations may have access to data about Mr Zuckerberg that wouldn't usually be available to the public. Developers were able to access information like a users' friends and other personal information – a decision that has been criticised, and which Facebook has taken efforts to now stop. Mr Zuckerberg didn't say exactly what third-party app had stolen his data.

Senator John Thune has stated that the Senate Commerce Committee plans to hold a hearing on Cambridge Analytica and "similar firms" that might have obtained Facebook data without permission. There are "plenty of questions" about what Cambridge Analytica did, Senator Thune said. There's no estimated timetable for the hearing. Whenever a hearing happens, Cambridge Analytica's response is likely to be familiar: it'll fight tooth and nail to assert its innocence. The company recently posted an article attempting to dismiss the "speculation and hearsay" surrounding data sharing, including its assertions that it and its data partner GSR obeyed the law when collecting and handling Facebook users' info.