Congress Never Used Private Data, Says Party’s Data Analytics Head

The Indian National Congress has not engaged the services of controversial analytics firm Cambridge Analytica, said party’s data analytics head Praveen Chakravarty responding to Law Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad’s allegations.

“I can guarantee we have used no such data nor do we have any plans of using such data,” Chakravarty told BloombergQuint in an interview. He clarified that Congress only uses data that is publicly available for making various decisions.

Cambridge Analytica came under fire recently following reports that it harvested data of more than 50 million users from Facebook and used it to target voters for political campaigning in the U.S. and U.K.

Also Read: Understanding the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica Story: QuickTake

The Congress’ defence comes in the wake of accusations by Prasad that Congress had roped in Cambridge Analytica to run their 2019 Lok Sabha campaign. He alleged the Congress of indulging in data manipulation and theft.

Chakravarty said that the issue at hand is about a social media platform violating the trust of its users by revealing private data to an external agency, in this case, Cambridge Analytica. He added that using publicly available data to understand voters better has been a practice in the past and is not necessarily illegal.

“Whatever we do in communicating through Facebook and WhatsApp is perfectly legitimate just as we do through television ads or hoardings,” he said. “It is the purpose of a political party to understand its voters better. That's the genesis of a democracy,” he added.

Watch this discussion with Amit Malviya, in-charge of the IT Cell at BJP, Congress Spokesperson Gourav Vallabh and S Anand, CEO and chief data scientist, Gramener on the extent of use of data analytics and social media in Indian politics right now.