Ole Miss Not Involved with Political Data Mining Companies, Spokeswoman Says

A former executive of the company allegedly involved in using Facebook data in the 2016 presidential race told a United Kingdom Parliament committee that a smaller analytical company was formed in partnership with the University of Mississippi data science department, according to published reports.
“The assertion that the University of Mississippi has received or analyzed any data from these companies is not true,” said Dr. Alice Clark, Ole Miss vice chancellor for university relations said in a statement to The Associated Press.
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The following report is from The Guardian in London.
A former Cambridge Analytica employee has alleged that insurance companies belonging to Arron Banks, a key financier in the Brexit campaign, were used as part of the campaign to leave the European Union.
Brittany Kaiser, the former business development director of Cambridge Analytica, told a UK parliamentary committee that she saw “with my own eyes” employees of Eldon Insurance staffing a call centre working for Leave.EU.
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Kaiser also told the committee that Banks set up a company called Big Data Dolphins, which she said was working with a data science team at the University of Mississippi, after he ceased negotiations with Cambridge Analytica. Kaiser questioned whether the data of British citizens “was sent abroad, specifically to Mississippi” for processing by Big Data Dolphins.
Leave.EU attacked Kaiser’s evidence as “a confused litany of lies and allegations” and said that Eldon Insurance did not share data with anyone. “No data has been sent to Mississippi. The unit is still in the planning stage, it employs no one and is not operational,” the group said.
For more information on this story, read The Guardian’s coverage.

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By Talbert Toole, associate editor of HottyToddy.com. He can be reached at talbert.toole@hottytoddy.com.