A US company that was secretly profiling hundreds of food and environmental health advocates in a private web portal has said it has halted the operations in the face of widespread backlash, after its actions were revealed by the Guardian and other reporting partners.
The St Louis, Missouri-based company, v-Fluence, said it is shuttering the service, which it called a “stakeholder wiki”, that featured personal details about more than 500 environmental advocates, scientists, politicians and others seen as opponents of pesticides and genetically modified (GM) crops.
Among those profiled was Robert F Kennedy Jr, President Trump’s controversial pick for secretary of health and human services.
The profiles – part of an effort that was financed, in part, by US taxpayer dollars – often provided derogatory information about the industry opponents and included home addresses and phone numbers and details about family members, including children.
They were provided to members of an invite-only web portal where v-Fluence also offered a range of other information to its roster of more than 1,000 members. The membership included staffers of US regulatory and policy agencies, executives from the world’s largest agrochemical companies and their lobbyists, academics and others.
The profiling was one element of a push to downplay pesticide dangers, discredit opponents and undermine international policymaking, according to court records, emails and other documents obtained by the non-profit newsroom Lighthouse Reports.
Lighthouse collaborated with the Guardian, the New Lede, Le Monde, Africa Uncensored, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and other international media partners on the September 2024 publication of the investigation.
News of the profiling and the private web portal sparked outrage and threats of litigation by some of the people and organizations profiled.
London research professor Michael Antoniou, who was profiled on the portal with derogatory information about his personal life and family members, said he fears the actions to take down the profiles may be “too little too late”.
“Those of us who were profiled still do not know who accessed the information and how it was used,” he said. “Did it hinder us in our careers or close doors that otherwise may have been open to us? The fact that v-Fluence and the industries it serves resorted to these underhand methods shows that they were unable to win on the level of the science.”
v-Fluence says it not only has eliminated the profiling, but also has made “significant staff cuts” after the public exposure, according to Jay Byrne, the former Monsanto public relations executive who founded and heads the company. Byrne blamed the company’s struggles on “rising costs from continued litigator and activist harassment of our staff, partners, and clients with threats and misrepresentations”.
He said the articles published about the company’s profiling and private web portal were part of a “smear campaign” which was based on “false and misleading misrepresentations” that were “not supported by any facts or evidence”.
Adding to the company’s troubles, several corporate backers and industry organizations have cancelled contracts with v-Fluence, according a post in a publication for agriculture professionals.
‘Intelligence gathering’
Since its launch in 2001, v-Fluence has worked with the world’s largest pesticide makers and provided self-described services that include “intelligence gathering”, “proprietary data mining” and “risk communications”.
One client of more than 20 years is Syngenta, a Chinese government enterprise-owned company currently being sued by thousands of people in the US and Canada who allege they developed the incurable brain disease Parkinson’s from using Syngenta’s paraquat weed killers. The first US trial is scheduled to get under way in March. Several others are scheduled over the following months.
Byrne and v-Fluence are named as co-defendants in one of the cases against Syngenta. They are accused of helping Syngenta suppress information about risks that the company’s paraquat could cause Parkinson’s disease, and of helping “neutralize” its critics. (Syngenta denies there’s a proven causal link between paraquat and Parkinson’s.) Byrne has denied the allegations in the lawsuit, citing “numerous incorrect and factually false claims”, made by plaintiffs.
v-Fluence, which also had the former agrochemical firm Monsanto as a client, secured some funding from the US government as part of a contract with a third party. Public spending records show the US Agency for International Development (USAid) contracted with a separate non-governmental organization that manages a government initiative to promote GM crops in African and Asian countries.
That organization, the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), then paid v-Fluence a little more than $400,000 from roughly 2013 through 2019 for services that included counteracting critics of “modern agriculture approaches” in Africa and Asia.
The “private social network portal” set up by v-Fluence was part of the contract, and was supposed to provide, among other things, “tactical support” for efforts to gain acceptance for the GM crops.
A separate contract signed by the USDA in the final months of Donald Trump’s first term also provided government employees with access to the portal, including the “stakeholder backgrounders” on scientists and activists which v-Fluence says it has now removed.
The stakeholder backgrounders included profiles on Kennedy, as well as Mehmet Oz, Trump’s nominee to oversee Medicare.
Kennedy’s profile described him as “an anti-vaccine, anti-GMO and anti-pesticide activist litigator who espouses various health and environmental conspiracy claims”.
Legal questions
After the operations were made public in articles by the Guardian and media partners, v-Fluence engaged a law firm to conduct an independent review of whether or not the profiling may have violated the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The regulation is intended to protect an individual’s right over collection and use of their personal data.
The analysis found that v-Fluence was “not subject to the GDPR”, but recommended v-Fluence handle “EU personal data consistent with the requirements of the GDPR in the event the Regulation is deemed to apply”, the company said in a statement. One of the recommendations was removing the profiles, the company said.
v-Fluence will continue to “offer stakeholder research with updated guidelines to avoid future misinterpretations of our work product”, according to the company statement.
Wendy Wagner, a law professor at the University of Texas with expertise in the regulation of toxic substances, said there seemed to be little good reason to maintain such a database other than to use it for harassing opponents.
“I’m quite familiar with corporate harassment of scientists who produce unwelcome research, and sometimes this includes dredging up personal information on the scientist to make their work look less credible,” Wagner said. “But I have not encountered the use of larger databases that track personal details of numerous critics of a corporation [including independent scientists and journalists]. It is hard to see the relevance of personal details short of use as harassment.”
This story is co-published with the New Lede, a journalism project of the Environmental Working Group
