Aleksandr Kogan


Aleksandr Kogan, who has also briefly used the name Dr Spectre, is an American data scientist, who is known for having developed the app that allowed Cambridge Analytica to collect personal details of 80 million Facebook users. He worked as a research associate at the University of Cambridge.

Early life

Kogan was born in what was then the Moldavian SSR in the USSR. His father is Jewish. He lived in Moscow before moving to the United States aged seven. He earned a bachelor's degree from the University of California, Berkeley in 2008, and a PhD from the University of Hong Kong in 2011.

Career

Kogan had a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Toronto before moving to Cambridge. He has been a lecturer in the Department of Psychology at the University of Cambridge since 2012, after which he became a Senior Research Associate until 2018. His page there states, "My lab investigates the prosociality and well-being from biological, psychological, and cross-cultural perspectives". Kogan is the CEO and founder of Philometrics, another big data analytics firm.
Kogan developed the app that allowed Cambridge Analytica to collect personal details of 80 million Facebook users. Interviewed by BBC Radio 4's Today programme and by CNN, he said that he was being used as a scapegoat by Facebook and Cambridge Analytica. Kogan said that he didn't know they would use the data to target voters, and attempted to downplay the potential efficacy of micro-targeting using the data he collected. During his time at Cambridge, he had an active collaboration and was a consultant for Facebook.
Kogan has also had an affiliation with the University of St. Petersburg in Russia, receiving funding for research on social media data mining and giving at least three lectures there since 2014. He declared this affiliation to the university, which nevertheless contributed to allegations that he was a Russian spy. He also received funding for research from UK, US, Canadian, and Chinese governments.

Personal life

Kogan was "temporarily known as Aleksandr Spectre" in 2015.