Cambridge Analytica's UK Parent SCL
Group Headquarted in Virginia Since June, 2017
Presidential Tower in Arlington, VA
3/18/18 J.D. Lakota (Boston, MA)
SCL Group is the British parent company of Cambridge
Analytica. Both companies were banned from Facebook's
advertising platform in March, 2018 after a whistle-blower in
Cambridge Analytica went public with information related to
the company's use of 50 million Facebook profiles to build a
set of psychological profiles they would use to tailor
politically persuasive advertisements for distribution during
the 2016 United States presidential campaign.
A google search for SCL Group
results with a Wikipedia description that states, "SCL Group
is a private British behavioral research and strategic
communication company. In the United States, SCL has gained
public recognition mainly through its affiliated corporation
Cambridge Analytica." Just to be clear, Google is serving a
definition stating that SCL Group is a "British" company. (As
well, the Cambridge Analytica office is in New York City.)
This was indeed true at one
time. Before June, 2017, and for many years prior, the SCL
Group website displayed a head office address in London, as
one would expect. Here is an example record of this shown in a
Wayback Machine archive page for SCL Group taken on April
27th, 2017.
SCL Group London Address
Listed as Head Office (Last Recorded Instance)
In case you haven't heard of
it, the Wayback Machine a tool provided by Internet
Archive, a non-profit organization in operation since
1996 that has been taking automated snapshots of webpages
across the globe to provide a record of the internet over
time. There are now similar organizations that do the same for
public social media data from the likes of Twitter.
The next webpage capture the
Wayback Machine has for SCL Group is from June 12th, 2017.
It's the first record of their website instead showing
Arlington, Virginia as the location of their head office,
instead of London. Multiple news and web page searches provide
no notice or record of the location change. It appears that
this article is the first public notification of the move of
the SCL Group head office from London to the United States.
SCL Group Virginia
Address Listed as Head Office (First Captured Instance)
At 2511 Jefferson Davis Highway
in Arlington, VA stands Presidential Tower. Per their website,
"The newly renovated 12-story property offers flexible,
efficient floors of approximately 31,000 square feet that are
well-suited for a variety of office layouts." Other tenants
include companies like BAM Technologies and Cobalt.
SCL Group lists suite 620 at
this address as their headquarters. As of March 18th, 2018,
the live website was displaying the Arlington, VA address.
Perusal of all available Wayback Machine website captures back
through June 12th, 2017 show the same address in Virginia as
the head office of the company.
Although the parent company of
Cambridge Analytica is still widely referred to as a British
umbrella company, it's imperative that SCL Group soon become
known as an American company. And not just any American
company, but one that is operating just down the road from
Washington, DC, the capitol of a country whose presidential
election it influenced in an allegedly nefarious way.
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