david_stillwell

The story is unfortunately complicated, so many news outlets get it wrong. myPersonality was my app that ran from 2007-12. Michal and I published papers based on its resulting data, which was collected with user consent and only from users who used the app (not their friends). We worked in the Psychometrics Centre - a research group in Cambridge University. Prof. Kogan joined Cambridge University later on in 2013 as an independent faculty member not in the Psychometrics Centre, created his own app 'mydigitallife,' and went on to work with Cambridge Analytica using data from users of his app and their friends.

So key points from my perspective are (1) My app isn't the same as Kogan's app, (2) I didn't work with Cambridge Analytica, (3) Kogan was independent faculty, not part of the Psychometrics Centre.

As you've noticed from my post history, I don't usually use this website. I do, however, have an alert set up that pings me links when someone uses my name online. I have it set up so that I can attempt to correct journalists who write about me and my research group and get the facts wrong.

Hope this clarifies things

Edit: Since I'm here. I think it's critical that NYU's Ad Observatory continues and that academics have freedom to collect data and report results that might embarrass rich and powerful companies. Tweet #9 in this thread is the key one ( https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1329873620353515520 ) - how do we know that FB's own ad library isn't good enough? Because Ad Observatory found that it wasn't reporting all instances of political ads.

Hi, I am David Stillwell. I can confirm that Kogan's app "thisisyourdigitallife" was his own endeavour and unrelated to the Psychometrics Centre. I'm not sure why Wired has written this now. They actually already wrote an extensive article about the Psychometrics Centre here in June 2018 if you want the real story: https://www.wired.com/story/the-man-who-saw-the-dangers-of-c...