CAMBRIDGE ANALYTICA
Cambridge Analytica is a British political consulting firm which combines data mining, data brokerage, and data analysis with strategic communication for the electoral process. No stranger to public discontent, Facebook Inc. is digging out of one of its biggest crises yet. The personal data of up to 87 million users, mostly in the U.S., was obtained by an analytics firm that, among its other work, helped elect President Donald Trump. In response to that revelation, lawmakers and regulators in the U.S. and U.K. increased their scrutiny of the social media giant, and at least some Facebook users canceled their accounts.
Cambrdge Analytica is a company that “uses data to change audience behavior,” both commercially and politically, according to its website. Its London-based affiliate, SCL Group, has a history of dubious tricks in elections around the globe. Cambridge Analytica worked in support of the 2016 campaigns of Trump, Ted Cruz and Ben Carson, all Republicans. It was founded in 2013 by former Renaissance Technologies co-CEO Robert Mercer, a major supporter of Trump in 2016; Trump’s campaign manager, Steve Bannon, served on the firm’s board. Days after the first reports about Facebook data, Cambridge Analytica said it had suspended its chief executive officer, Alexander Nix, who caught on camera boasting about the firm’s willingness to use bribes, entrapment with sex workers and other possibly illegal tactics to undermine political candidates.
In April 2010, Facebook announced the launch of a platform called Open Graph to third-party apps. This update allowed external developers to reach out to Facebook users and request permission to access a large chunk of their personal data — and, crucially, to access their Facebook friends' personal data too.
If accepted, these apps would then have access to a user's name, gender, location, birthday, education, political preferences, relationship status, religious views, online chat status and more. In fact, with additional permissions, external sites could also gain access to a person's private messages.
Less than five weeks after Facebook launched Open Graph API version 1.0 for developers, Zuckerberg wrote an op-ed for the Washington post in which he vowed to resolve users' concerns about how their personal information was being managed.
He said: "We have also heard that some people don't understand how their personal information is used and worry that it is shared in ways they don't want. I'd like to clear that up now."
Cambridge academic Aleksandr Kogan and his company Global Science Research created an app called "thisisyourdigitallife" in 2013. The app prompted users to answer questions for a psychological profile. Almost 300,000 users were thought to have been paid to take the psychological test — with the app then harvesting their personal data. It also gathered data from their Facebook friends, which reportedly resulted in Kogan having access to the data of millions of Facebook profiles.
In 2014, Facebook adapted its rules to limit a developer's access to user data. This change was made to ensure a third-party was not able to access a user's friends' data without gaining permission first.
However, the rule changes were not retroactively imposed— and Kogan did not delete the data thought to have been improperly acquired.
In late 2015,The Guardian reported that Cambridge Analytica was helping Ted Cruz's presidential campaign. The report suggested the Republican candidate was using psychological data based on research spanning tens of millions of Facebook users in an attempt to gain an advantage over his political rivals — including Donald Trump.
In response to the story, Facebook said that when it learned about the data leaks, it sought to ban Kogan's app and legally pressured both Kogan and Cambridge Analytica to remove all of the data they had improperly acquired. The social media giant claims both Kogan and the London-based elections consultancy firm certified that the data had been deleted.
Ahead of the U.S. presidential election, Trump's campaign team began investing heavily in Facebook ads. The move involved the help of Cambridge Analytica and — during an undercover sting operation — the company's managing director, Mark Turnbull, told Britain's Channel 4 News that the firm was responsible for the "Defeat Crooked Hilary" video campaign on Facebook.
Christopher Wylie, a co-founder of the political data analytics firm, revealed the alleged practices to both newspapers. Wylie claimed the data sold to Cambridge Analytica was then used to develop "psychographic" profiles of people and deliver pro-Trump material to them online.
Cambridge Analytica has since denied any of Kogan's data was used in connection to the Trump campaign.
THE QUESTION IS ARE WE SAFE? IS CAMBRIDGE ANALYTICA WATCHING US?
