How did it access so many profiles?

How did it access so many profiles?

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• Mr Kogan's app requested permission from people taking his personality quiz to access some information from their Facebook profiles.
• About 265,000 people had downloaded the app at the time - and it also asked for permission to request "more limited information" from the user's friends.
• Facebook says this "is no longer possible" - but at the time, such a request was controlled by the privacy settings of that user's friends. So if a user had their account set to allow sharing with a friend's apps, and the friend gave permission to Mr Kogan's app, it could read some information.
• Facebook's policies, however, said that this data can only be used for the app's stated purpose - and cannot be transferred or sold on.

Cambridge Analytica, however, said that once the company learned about how the data provided by Mr Kogan was sourced, it deleted all the relevant records, in December 2015.

It said none of that data was used in the services it provided to Mr Trump's campaign. It added that it did not use or hold data from Facebook profiles​.

But in a statement, Facebook wrote that it had "we received reports that, contrary to the certifications we were given, not all data was deleted".

A spokesperson for Facebook also said that the data collection was not a hack or a breach.

"People knowingly provided their information, no systems were infiltrated, and no passwords or sensitive pieces of information were stolen or hacked," the company said.

Britain's Observer newspaper reports that the incident was known about more than two years ago.

But the newspaper said Facebook's action to ban Cambridge Analytica and its parent group SCL this week happened four days after its reporters contacted the social network for comment about its upcoming story.

On Saturday, as the story emerged in newspapers, the UK Information Commissioner, the country's main data protection regulator, said it was "investigating the circumstances in which Facebook data may have been illegally acquired and used".

However, the statement did not mention Mr Kogan, his company, or Cambridge Analytica, instead saying it was part of an "ongoing investigation into the use of data analytics for political purposes".

Alexander Nix, founder of Cambridge Analytica, was interviewed by a committee of British MPs last month on the firm's practices.