UK investigators searched the London offices of embattled political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica on Friday.
“This is just one part of a larger investigation into the use of personal data and analytics for political purposes. As you will expect, we will now need to collect, assess and consider the evidence before coming to any conclusions,” UK Information Commissioner Elizabeth Denham said in a statement Friday.
According to the New York Times, roughly 20 investigators from the Information Commissioner’s Office visited Cambridge Analytica on Friday after a warrant was obtained.
Denham announced on Monday that her office would seek the warrant, specifically to search the company’s servers and databases. She told Britain’s Channel 4 at the time that Cambridge Analytica had failed to comply satisfactorily with a “demand for access.”
Cambridge Analytica has suffered a wave of public relations disasters sparked by a report in the New York Times last weekend that the firm secretly collected Facebook data from 50 million profiles, in order to target political ads.
On Monday, Channel 4 posted a 19-minute video in which Cambridge CEO Alexander Nix bragged that the firm has used bribes and sex workers to entrap politicians on behalf of clients.
Cambridge Analytica denounced Nix’s comments and suspended him as CEO after that video was made public. And in a statement, the company said his comments “do not represent the values or operations of the firm and his suspension reflects the seriousness with which we view this violation.”
Just two days later, it was reported Nix had used the N-word in an internal company email.