TECH TRACKER ROUND-UP: Facebook remains in focus over Cambridge Analytica; Bitcoin on the rise

Here the Evening Standard business team highlights all the major tech news today.

Facebook is in focus as a researcher at the centre of a scandal over the alleged misuse of the data of nearly 100 million Facebook users said that the work he did was not useful for micro-targeted adverts.

Aleksandr Kogan, who worked for the University of Cambridge, is at the centre of a controversy over Cambridge Analytica’s use of millions of users’ data without their permission after it was hired by Donald Trump for his 2016 election campaign.

Kogan said that the dataset he compiled would be of little help for targeted advertising, and that the data he obtained would not be useful for identifying individuals.

“I believe the project we did makes little to no sense if the goal is to run targeted ads on Facebook,” he said in written testimony to a parliamentary committee. “In fact, the platform’s tools provide companies a far more effective pathway to target people based on their personalities than using scores from users from our work.”

Facebook has said that the personal information of about 87 million users may have been improperly shared with political consultancy Cambridge Analytica, after Kogan created a personality quiz app to collect the data.

Finally the price of bitcoin has returned above $9,000 for the first time since March, having risen by more than a third in value over the last two weeks. The world’s most valuable cryptocurrency now has a market cap of more than $150 billion, though this is still down considerably from its peak valuation of around $320 billion in late 2017.

Other major cryptocurrencies have been boosted by bitcoin’s recent resurgence, including ethereum, ripple and litecoin. The most significant gains were experienced by the bitcoin spin-off bitcoin cash, which has almost doubled in value in the last week from $750 to $1,500.