A British public interest group has filed a lawsuit in a Mississippi court against two companies controlled by Arron Banks, the pro-Brexit donor, following allegations that the firms may have violated UK data protection rules in an attempt to sway the 2016 vote to leave the EU.
Fair Vote Project, a British activist group that is campaigning for changes to UK election rules, has launched the legal action against Eldon Insurance and a Bristol-based software development group, Big Data Dolphins. Fair Vote has asked a judge to permanently bar the firms from destroying any data that they might be holding in Mississippi.
At the heart of the complaint is an allegation that the companies may have used data that had been mined in the UK and combined it with information that had been collected from Eldon Insurance, which sells car insurance in the UK.
The suit further alleges that the data may have been brought to the University of Mississippi, where the companies sought to create their own version of Cambridge Analytica, the controversial firm that used data mined from social media networks to try to sway voters’ behaviour.
Fair Vote and the lead plaintiff in the case, a British resident called Kyle Taylor, have said in court filings that they want to determine whether any UK data was illegally transferred to Mississippi as part of the groups’ plans.
It is also seeking answers about whether data was illegally used to target political advertising to UK voters before the referendum to leave the EU on 23 June 2016.
The case was filed after evidence heard before a parliamentary committee raised questions about Eldon Insurance and Big Data Dolphins’involvement with the University of Mississippi.
Brittany Kaiser, a former head of business development at Cambridge Analytica, testified before a parliamentary committee that she had been “made aware” that Big Data Dolphins had been set up soon after Banks had ceased negotiations with Cambridge Analytica.
She added: “This company has reportedly worked with a data science team at the University of Mississippi. If the Mississippi team has held or processed UK citizens’ data in the US, I believe that is likely to be a criminal offence; although it is for the empowered authorities to pursue any such question and secure the associated evidence.”
The US judge has not yet ruled in the case. The UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has voiced its support for Fair Vote’s lawsuit and asked the Mississippi court to grant the preservation order relating to the data in order to allow the ICO “the time it requires to establish contact with the University of Mississippi and conduct its [own] thorough investigation”.
The allegations have been denied by Banks, who said that his first contact with officials at the University of Mississippi occurred months after the Brexit vote.
“We are slightly bemused,” Banks told the Guardian. “I think where it has come from was what Brittany Kaiser said before the committee, but actually she was just talking rubbish.” He later added that he believed Kaiser was “just speculating” about his companies’ activities in Mississippi.
“The only thing we have is an empty office that was due to be refurbished. We have no staff there,” Banks said. He added that his company Eldon Insurance had “strong data controls” and that it was “just not true” that data had been used in connection to the 2016 referendum.
Banks’s companies have asked for the complaint to be dismissed.
Josh Gladden, the University of Mississippi’s vice-chancellor for research, testified that Big Data Dolphins has no access to university computer servers and had not stored anything at the university.
He said university researchers never agreed specific projects with Eldon and had not been asked to destroy evidence. “The result of this investigation is, to our satisfaction, that there’s been no data transfer between any of the companies and the University of Mississippi,” Gladden said.
Victoria Sena, who manages the Big Data Dolphins project, testified that she never discussed server access. “I haven’t transferred data,” Sena said. “I don’t have access to data. There is no way to access it. There is no one to transfer it to.”