Academic behind Facebook scandal says it's 'unlikely' data was used to help Trump campaign

Facebook data obtained by Cambridge Analytica was probably not used for Donald Trump's presidential election campaign, according to the academic at the heart of the data scandal surrounding the social network.

Aleksandr Kogan, a researcher at Cambridge University, made the claim to U.K. lawmakers at a committee on fake news and data protection on Tuesday. Kogan's company Global Science Research shared data on millions of Facebook users — and their friends — with Cambridge Analytica.

"I think it is unlikely," he said of claims that Facebook data he shared with Cambridge Analytica was used to help Trump's campaign.

Cambridge Analytica, which is backed by Republican donor Robert Mercer, initially worked for Ted Cruz's presidential campaign but switched to help Trump's campaign after Cruz backed out of the race.

Kogan said Cruz's campaign team was "unhappy" with the micro-targeting product that was used by Cambridge Analytica to influence voters.

"The reason I think it's unlikely is my understanding from talking to others who knew a bit more — because this is much after my time — but my understanding is the Ted Cruz campaign was quite unhappy with the product that SCL (Cambridge Analytica's parent company) delivered to them.

"And also SCL at this point is under enormous pressure from Facebook to clean up their act and delete all the data. If I'm a company, I don't know if I would risk the legal liability of Facebook suing me to keep a data set that has apparently failed with the last client it was used for."

Kogan said that it was difficult to distinguish between SCL and Cambridge Analytica.

Cambridge Analytica and Facebook were not immediately available when contacted by CNBC.

Reports have said that Kogan shared the data of 50 million Facebook users to Cambridge Analytica without their permission. Facebook has admitted that 87 million users' profiles were shared with the organization. Cambridge Analytica has refuted this number, and maintains only 30 million profiles were shared.

Kogan said in written evidence to the committee that he began collaborating directly with Facebook in 2013, on studies that aimed to enhance understanding of people's emotions. He said the social network provided him with a number of "macro-level" data sets on Facebook friendships and the use of emoticons.

The researcher spoke out in his first broadcast interview following the data scandal on Sunday with CBS' "60 Minutes." He said that Facebook's tools allowed developers to gain access to the data of users and their friends, whether the friends of users had given their consent or not.

"It seems crazy now but this was a core feature of the Facebook platform for years," he told the show. "This was not a special permission you had to get. This was just something that was available to any developer that wanted it."

Kogan created an app in 2013 called "This Is Your Digital Life" that used psychological quizzes to gather data on Facebook users. The data was then shared to Cambridge Analytica.

Controversy has surrounded Facebook in the wake of the scandal, as concerns grow over how data may have been used to influence various elections, including the U.S. presidential election and the U.K.'s vote to leave the European Union, both in 2016.

You can read a timeline of how the scandal emerged here.