Via Facebook, Cambridge Analytica exploited data on 50 million persons for election purposes
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Both The New York Times and the Observer published major stories Saturday morning about Cambridge Analytica, a data analytics company that contracted with the Trump campaign. As Kurt Wagner at Recode pointed out, these stories made Facebook’s belated susVia Facebook, Cambridge Analytica exploited data on 50 million persons for election purposes
Both The New York Times and the Observer published major stories Saturday morning about Cambridge Analytica, a data analytics company that contracted with the Trump campaign. As Kurt Wagner at Recode pointed out, these stories made Facebook’s belated suspension of Cambridge a few hours earlier more understandable. But Facebook may have a difficult time shielding itself from the fallout from revelations like those described under this headline—50 million Facebook profiles harvested for Cambridge Analytica in major data breach: The data analytics firm that worked with Donald Trump’s election team and the winning Brexit campaign harvested millions of Facebook profiles of US voters, in one of the tech giant’s biggest ever data breaches, and used them to build a powerful software program to predict and influence choices at the ballot box. A whistleblower has revealed to the Observer how Cambridge Analytica – a company owned by the hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, and headed at the time by Trump’s key adviser Steve Bannon – used personal information taken without authorisation in early 2014 to build a system that could profile individual US voters, in order to target them with personalised political advertisements. Christopher Wylie, who worked with a Cambridge University academic to obtain the data, told the Observer: “We exploited Facebook to harvest millions of people’s profiles. And built models to exploit what we knew about them and target their inner demons. That was the basis the entire company was built on.” [...] Actually tens of millions. From documents and a confirmation from Facebook, the Observer confirmed that the social media giant had by 2015 learned that the information had been harvested. But it didn’t let Facebook users know about this gigantic data breach and it didn’t do much to improve the security of 50 million people on its site. Read more