He had been an anonymous source for an article in 2017 in The Observer by Cadwalladr, headlined "The Great British Brexit Robbery". Information on the data breach came to a head in March 2018 with the emergence of a whistleblower, an ex-Cambridge Analytica employee Christopher Wylie. According to PolitiFact, in his 2016 presidential campaign, Trump paid Cambridge Analytica in September, October, and November for data on Americans and their political preferences. Further reports followed in November 2016 by McKenzie Funk for the New York Times Sunday Review, December 2016 by Hannes Grasseger and Mikael Krogerus for the Swiss publication Das Magazin (later translated and published by Vice), in February 2017 by Carole Cadwalladr for The Guardian (starting in February 2017), and in March 2017 by Mattathias Schwartz for The Intercept. He reported that Cambridge Analytica was working for United States Senator Ted Cruz using data harvested from millions of people's Facebook accounts without their consent. The collection of personal data by Cambridge Analytica was first reported in December 2015 by Harry Davies, a journalist for The Guardian. In this way, Cambridge Analytica acquired data from millions of Facebook users. However, Facebook allowed this app not only to collect personal information from survey respondents but also from respondents’ Facebook friends. Cambridge Analytica then arranged an informed consent process for research in which several hundred thousand Facebook users would agree to complete a survey for payment that was only for academic use. Overview Īleksandr Kogan, a data scientist at the University of Cambridge, was hired by Cambridge Analytica, an offshoot of SCL Group, to develop an app called "This Is Your Digital Life" (sometimes stylized as "thisisyourdigitallife"). The online movement #DeleteFacebook trended on Twitter. The scandal sparked an increased public interest in privacy and social media's influence on politics. Nevertheless, Cambridge Analytica's openness about their methods and the caliber of their clients - including the Trump presidential campaign and the UK's Vote Leave campaign - brought the challenges of psychological targeting that scholars have been warning against to public awareness. Other advertising agencies have been implementing various forms of psychological targeting for years and Facebook had patented a similar technology in 2012. In May 2018, Cambridge Analytica filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy. In October 2019, Facebook agreed to pay a £500,000 fine to the UK Information Commissioner's Office for exposing the data of its users to a "serious risk of harm". In July 2019, it was announced that Facebook was to be fined $5 billion by the Federal Trade Commission due to its privacy violations. In response, Facebook apologized for their role in the data harvesting and their CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified in front of Congress. Information about the data misuse was disclosed in 2018 by Christopher Wylie, a former Cambridge Analytica employee, in interviews with The Guardian and The New York Times. Cambridge Analytica was also widely accused of interfering with the Brexit referendum, although the official investigation recognised that the company was not involved "beyond some initial enquiries" and that "no significant breaches" took place. Cambridge Analytica used the data to provide analytical assistance to the 2016 presidential campaigns of Ted Cruz and Donald Trump. The app harvested the data of up to 87 million Facebook profiles. The app consisted of a series of questions to build psychological profiles on users, and collected the personal data of the users’ Facebook friends via Facebook's Open Graph platform. The data was collected through an app called "This Is Your Digital Life", developed by data scientist Aleksandr Kogan and his company Global Science Research in 2013. In the 2010s, personal data belonging to millions of Facebook users was collected without their consent by British consulting firm Cambridge Analytica, predominantly to be used for political advertising.
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