APNewsBreak: Data scientist drops Facebook defamation suit

Aleksandr Kogan, the data scientist at the center of Facebook's Cambridge Analytica privacy scandal, said he is dropping a defamation lawsuit against the social network rather than engage in an expensive, drawn-out legal battle.

Kogan, 33, sued the social giant in March, claiming the social giant scapegoated him to deflect attention from its own misdeeds, thwarting his academic career in the process. The suit sought unspecified monetary damages and a retraction and correction of what Kogan said were "false and defamatory statements."

"We thought there was a one percent chance they would do the right thing," Kogan told The Associated Press. Facebook is "brilliant and ruthless," he added. "And if you get in their way they will destroy you."

A Facebook spokesperson said the company had "no comment to share concerning this development."

The former Cambridge University psychology professor created an online personality test app in 2014 that vacuumed up the personal data of as many as 87 million Facebook users . The vast majority of those were unwitting online friends of the roughly 200,000 people Kogan says were paid about $4 to participate in his "ThisIsYourDigital Life" quiz.

Cambridge Analytica, a political data-mining firm founded by conservative power brokers including billionaire Robert Mercer and former White House aide Steve Bannon, paid Kogan $800,000 to conduct his research and to provide the firm with a copy of the data. The project's aim was to create voter profiles based on Facebook users' online behavior to help in tailored political-ad targeting, according to Christopher Wylie, a former data scientist at the firm.

In March 2018, when the scandal broke, Facebook executives charged that Kogan had lied to them about how the data he harvested would be used. Facebook deputy general counsel Paul Grewal claimed...