Cambridge Analytica in 3 Paragraphs

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ROBINSON MEYER 3:23 PM ET

... In June 2014, a researcher named Aleksandr Kogan developed a personality-quiz app for Facebook. It was heavily influenced by a similar personality-quiz app made by the Psychometrics Centre, a Cambridge University laboratory where Kogan worked. About 270,000 people installed Kogan’s app on their Facebook account. But as with any Facebook developer at the time, Kogan could access data about those users or their friends. And when Kogan’s app asked for that data, it saved that information into a private database instead of immediately deleting it. Kogan provided that private database, containing information about 50 million Facebook users, to the voter-profiling company Cambridge Analytica. Cambridge Analytica used it to make 30 million “psychographic” profiles about voters. For its part, Facebook says it learned about Kogan’s private database in 2015, when it removed his app and demanded that he and any of his partners delete the data ...

Cambridge Analytica has significant ties to some of President Trump’s most prominent supporters and advisers. Rebekah Mercer, a Republican donor and a co-owner of Breitbart News, sits on the board of Cambridge Analytica. Her father, Robert Mercer, invested $15 million in Cambridge Analytica on the recommendation of his political adviser, Steve Bannon, according to the Times. On Monday, hidden-camera footage appeared to show Alexander Nix, Cambridge Analytica’s CEO, offering to bribe and blackmail public officials around the world. If Nix did so, it would violate U.K. law. Cambridge Analytica suspended Nix on Tuesday.

Cambridge Analytica also used its “psychographic” tools to make targeted online ad buys for the Brexit “Leave” campaign, the 2016 presidential campaign of Ted Cruz, and the 2016 Trump campaign. If any British Cambridge Analytica employees without a green card worked on those two U.S. campaigns, they did so in violation of federal law ...

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/03/the-cambridge-analytica-scandal-in-three-paragraphs/556046/

[WhiskeyGrinder]

1. Data is the new gold. Many, many, many companies are in the business of developing software

that makes it easy to collect, scrape and store enormous amounts of data, spin it, sort it and make it "deliver insights." Many, many companies are in the business of buying, trading for, accessing and selling data sets for other companies to analyze. Every website you visit does it to some extent. DU does it. Your employer is probably doing it. Every prehire assessment, every employee survey you complete, every link you follow is recorded and analyzed. Oh, there are variations and some nominal protections, of course -- promises to anonymize and protect your data, assurances that it's only to improve the customer experience, and so on -- which people would rather believe than verify. It's difficult to overstate how much of this goes on -- and how very, very little people have been paying attention to it.

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