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Cambridge Analytica-connected researcher paid for Twitter data access

The access was limited to public tweets for five months between 2014 and 2015.

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Aleksandr Kogan.

 CBS/60 Minutes

Aleksandr Kogan, the app developer at the center of Facebook's data privacy scandal with consultancy Cambridge Analytica, and his firm Global Science Research (GSR) were sold data by Twitter in 2015, the Telegraph reports.

"GSR did have one-time API access to a random sample of public tweets for a five-month period from December 2014 to April 2015," a Twitter spokeswoman said in a statement to CNET on Monday. Twitter conducted an internal review and did not find any private data about its users had been accessed. 

Cambridge Analytica is at the heart of a scandal that's stirred up two national governments and Facebook, the world's largest social network. Facebook banned the UK-based political data analysis firm last month, saying it had improperly received data from as many as 87 million user profiles.

Cambridge Analytica also stated on Twitter it had never received Twitter data from Aleksandr Kogan or GSR.

Watch this: Cambridge Analytica is just the tip of the iceberg for Facebook's data issues