60 Minutes report on Cambridge Analytica: Extra clips
On 60 Minutes this week, Lesley Stahl describes how a company called Cambridge Analytica was able to surreptitiously gain access to the personal data of as many as 87 million Facebook users. The man who mined that data for Cambridge Analytica is a scientist named Aleksandr Kogan, who told his story to Stahl in a 60 Minutes report titled "The Data Miner."
Here are some memorable moments that were not included in Stahl's story:
Kogan: A Russian spy?
Lesley Stahl: I have seen, in print, accusations that you are a Russian spy.
Aleksandr Kogan: So that's a remarkable accusation for someone that had to flee Russia when I was seven with my family, because we were getting death threats, because my dad was Jewish. I mean, I grew up right here in New York and New Jersey. I went to school in the area. I went to university here. I've been back to Russia a few times in my adult life.
Lesley Stahl: Why did you go back?
Aleksandr Kogan: To visit, you know? That's-- first time I went back, I went for a wedding for one of my cousins, second cousins. I went when I was-- in 2013, I went on vacation with a couple of friends to St. Petersburg. And it's a lovely city.
Lesley Stahl: You've been described as [a] Soviet-born scientist who has been to Russia. All very suspicious sounding.
Aleksandr Kogan: Yeah.
Lesley Stahl: Haven't you collaborated with some Russian scientists?
Aleksandr Kogan: Yeah. One of my vacations, I dropped by the university -- St. Petersburg State University. And I met some of the psychologists there. I'm like, "Hey, it'd be great to collaborate." And in truth, this allowed me to just visit more often for free. This is how academics travel. We go give talks. And the university pays for it. And then we go on vacation.
Lesley Stahl: Junkets.
Aleksandr Kogan: Junkets, exactly.
The trouble with Kogan
Aleksandr Kogan: What troubles me about this is not whether I broke Facebook's terms of service. What troubles me is how people have reacted to it, and that that fundamentally is the issue for me.
Lesley Stahl: Yeah, but the issue really is did you do anything wrong?
Aleksandr Kogan: Yeah. But that has nothing to do with Facebook because like--
Lesley Stahl: What has nothing to do with Facebook?
Aleksandr Kogan: If I did something wrong or not, that has everything to do with the American people and the global population, how they respond to it. If Facebook tells me, "You are fine," but everybody else tells me I was wrong, I was wrong. So, I'm not here to answer to Facebook. I'm here to answer to the public. And I think to the public-- it doesn't matter what the Facebook terms of service said. They still feel that I violated them and they're angry that their data was taken and used in ways they could not have imagined or expected. And that's what's troublesome to me. And that's what I'm really sorry for.
What did Cambridge Analytica pay?
Lesley Stahl: Did Cambridge Analytica pay you?
Aleksandr Kogan: Yeah. So the agreement we had with them was they would pay for the data collection. So they paid about $800,000 to help us collect the data. And so this--
Lesley Stahl: Because you paid people who took the quiz.
Aleksandr Kogan: Exactly. $3 to $4 a person. 200,000 people, you get to $800,000. In addition, Cambridge Analytica eventually paid my company for the predictions. And this money was eventually used by us to try to build a product that we abandoned, to buy some Twitter data for this abandoned product, and legal fees once Facebook came knocking.
Lesley Stahl: So when it was all said and done, you personally…
Aleksandr Kogan: Nothing.
Lesley Stahl: Nothing?
Aleksandr Kogan: I was never paid any salary by my company.
Lesley Stahl: You're still teaching. You have your lab?
Aleksandr Kogan: Yeah. I still have my lab. But my contract with Cambridge will end in September of this year.
Lesley Stahl: Oh.
Aleksandr Kogan: And the plan was that I'd be moving on.
Lesley Stahl: The plan was you'd have a business.
Aleksandr Kogan: I'd have a business.
Lesley Stahl: But that doesn't exist anymore.
Aleksandr Kogan: That doesn't exist.
Editor's Note: Lesley Stahl's report "The Data Miner" originally aired on April 22, 2018. Since then, Cambridge Analytica announced it was dissolving as a company.