Mumbai, March 22: Himanshu Sharma, Vice-President – Ovleno Busines Intelligence (OBI), came out with a clarification surrounding the ongoing controversy of data-breach scandal in India, earlier today. The Vice President clarified that his organization believes in the ethical and legal system in India and their organisation had not taken any project with Cambridge Analytica, related to social media (especially Facebook).

Controversy in a nutshell:

According to an investigation done by a Britain-based ‘Channel 4’, Cambridge Analytica in association with India-based research firm – OBI – tried to influence the voters, and eventually the results, during the four crucial elections in recent years for their clients. The political clients mentioned on OBI’s website are BJP, Congress, and Janata Dal-United (JD-U).

The UK-based analytics firm, Cambridge Analytica, was alleged to have breached data of over 50 million Facebook users.

Clarification:

In his clarification, Himanshu Sharma said, “We believe in ethics & legal system of India. We are not denying our association with (Strategic Communication Laboratories) SCL / CA (Cambridge Analytica). We are a ground research company closely working with various media houses & not undertake any project with Cambridge Analytica related to social media (especially Facebook).”

BJP vs Congress:

A day after the controversy broke out; politicians cut across party lines left no chance of blaming their opponents in the data-breach-scandal. Political parties – Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Indian National Congress (INC) – left no stone unturned and shifted the blame on each other in no time.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg admitted making a mistake over this data-scandal and stated that the company needs to step up. In his statement, Zuckerberg said, “We have a responsibility to protect your data, and if we can't then we don't deserve to serve you.”

It will be interesting to see how far the acknowledgement from OBI and acceptance from Facebook founder will help the cause. For now, the political parties are embroiled in blaming each other; it will be interesting to see how the matter goes from here and if there’s any substantial outcome from it!

(The above story first appeared on LatestLY on Mar 22, 2018 06:26 PM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website latestly.com).