New documents released by Facebook on Friday appear to suggest the social media giant knew about issues with Cambridge Analytica as early as September 2015.
The internal communications mention concerns regarding the company that used Facebook users' private data create psychological profiles of voters in the United States before the 2016 presidential election.
"We believe this document has the potential to confuse two different events surrounding our knowledge of Cambridge Analytica," Facebook wrote in a blog post, underscoring that the company did not know about violations by Aleksandr Kogan, who sold the data to Cambridge Analytica, until December 2015.
"In September 2015, a Facebook employee shared unsubstantiated rumors from a competitor of Cambridge Analytica, which claimed that the data analytics company was scraping public data. This was the kind of data that you can see on someone’s Facebook profile even if you are not friends with them, a serious but frequent problem across the internet," Facebook added, stating that an engineer had looked into the issue and did not find any evidence for these claims.
