Cambridge Analytica staff set up new data company

Emerdata directors include Cambridge Analytica's suspended chief executive Alexander Nix. Picture / Getty Images

Cambridge Analytica may be shutting up shop but the power players behind it look to have set up a new company called Emerdata.

Companies House, the UK's official registrar of businesses and organisations, lists an active company called Emerdata Limited, headquartered at the same offices as Cambridge Analytica's parent company SCL Group and run by much of the same management and investors as Cambridge Analytica.

The company's directors include Cambridge Analytica's suspended chief executive Alexander Nix, other executives from its parent company SCL Group and Rebekah and Jennifer Mercer - the daughters of Donald Trump-supporting billionaire Robert Mercer.

The company says it operates in "data processing, hosting and related activities" on the Companies House website.

Several of the remaining people listed as Emerdata directors, including Alex Tayler and Julian Wheatland, held senior roles at Cambridge Analytica.

In the Facebook and Cambridge Analytica data breach, the political consultancy created an app to collect data from Facebook users supposedly under an informed consent process.

The data was purportedly only to be used for academic study, and targeted hundreds of thousands of Facebook users.

The Guardian said this morning that Cambridge Analytica and its parent company SCL were starting insolvency proceedings.

"The company is immediately ceasing all operations and the boards have applied to appoint insolvency practitioners Crowe Clark Whitehill LLP to act as the independent administrator for Cambridge Analytica," the company said in a statement obtained by the Guardian.

Cambridge Analytica denied any wrongdoing and blamed negative media attention for its closure.

Peter Bailey, general manager at New Zealand company Aura Information Security, said the issue raised important questions for all businesses.

"When you are holding customer data, you must have a clear idea of what it is, how it is being used and where it is stored," Bailey said.

"The appropriate safeguards must be in place to protect the information. And, if it is shared or on-sold to any third parties, it must be protected by those third parties with the same level of rigour, as well as the explicit informed consent of the people from whom that data originated."

The Government recently introduced a parliamentary Privacy Bill aimed at replacing the outdated 25-year-old Privacy Act.

With the changes set to come into force soon, Bailey said businesses needed to take a closer look at the way they held and used data.