The Facebook logo is displayed on the company website in an illustration photo taken in Bordeaux, France on February 1, 2017. (Reuters/ Regis Duvignau)
NEW YORK: Two Facebook employees co-authored a 2015 study with embattled Cambridge researcher Aleksandr Kogan that used anonymized data that tallied 57 billion friendships around the world.
The study was hailed by Cambridge University as the first output of ongoing collaborations between Kogan's lab and Facebook. Facebook suspended Kogan last week for sharing data he gathered separately and passed on to data-mining company Cambridge Analytica, which is not affiliated with the university.
Facebook told The Guardian in a report Thursday that it provided the data in 2013 but that it contained no personally identifiable information. Facebook did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The study also says Kogan used Amazon's Mechanical Turk to get U.S. respondents to download an app that gave him access to their Facebook data and the location of their friends.
