Cambridge Analytica: Facebook Data Scandal

Cambridge Analytica is a company that specializes in data analysis for the purposes of targeted advertising specifically in politics though they also work in traditional marketing. Cambridge Analytica was formed in 1930 whose parent company is SCL Group. The company is partly owned by the family of Robert Mercer, an American hedge-fund manager who supports many politically conservative causes. The firm maintains offices in London, New York City, and Washington, D.C.

In today’s world observing people’s behavior on the internet is very easy since Facebook is a gold mine for data with over 2 billion users around the world. They use Facebook as a platform for primary means of digital communication and self-expression happily sharing inside opinions with their friend list and depending on their privacy settings and how much they interact with pages with anyone who just takes the time to look which makes it easy for people who work on behavioral data analysis for companies like Cambridge Analytica to gather information and data on a person. The only thing standing in the way of this treasure trove of data are a user’s privacy settings which prevent outsiders from seeing users complete profiles and feeds but people can keep their pages friends only and accept friend requests as carefully as they want but the second they authorize a third party app or game on Facebook or use that convenient login with Facebook option offered on outside websites it grants third party access to a certain amount of your personal information or in some cases just your entire Facebook profile. Cambridge Analytica also acquired user’s data through complex physcological survey willingly completed by a Facebook user ostensibly as a personality test. In 2012 a Russian American Physcology Professor named Alexander Kogan who lives in Silicon Valley released an app called this is your digital life the app was basically a personality quiz a simplified version of the types of personality quizzes used in phycological studies and in order to use it you had to first sign in using Facebook. Users were not only handing over physcological profiles of themselves to a complete stranger but also their complete Facebook profiles. Alexander Kogan company analyzed both data sets finding correlations between people personality results and their social media behavior. Pre-2014 Facebook allowed this kind of third parties to not only look at your Facebook profile but also to look at the profiles of anyone on your friends list. So using a predictive model that they developed by comparing peoples test results and their Facebook activity they applied that model to the profiles of peoples friends predicting those peoples behavior and opinions only around two hundred and seventy thousand people downloaded the app thanks to the ability to see peoples friends, Cambridge Analytica and Kogan asked information about around fifty million people most of whom never downloaded the app the personality quiz app much less consented to be physcologicaly analyzed. After some point amassing all this information Alexander Kogan was approached by Cambridge Analytica and they worked out a deal where he gave them all the information he’d collected using his app the names, locations, genders, ages, test results and predicted test results of millions of people. Cambridge Analytica then used that data to create targeted advertisement promoting The Ted Cruz Republican primary campaign and the Donald Trump Presidential Campaign and the Leave EU Brexit Campaign which is unofficial but can be true. There is specific methods we know that know thanks to a former employee who talked to the New York Times and The Guardian in articles published over the weekend as well as a set of undercover videos released by the UK’s channel 4. Facebook noticed the amount of backlash that were heading their way preemptively issued a statement to their newsroom blog that they had suspended Cambridge Analytica and SEL group and Alexander Kogan from their platform for violating their privacy policy. The violation was that Alexander Kogan had given his data to Cambridge Analytica. Facebook said that they confronted both the parties in 2015 and promised to delete the data but the data was not deleted. Facebook also said, “the claim that this data breach is completely false Alexandra Kogan requested and gained access to information from users who chose to sign up to his app and everyone involved gave their consent people knowingly provided their information no systems were infiltrated and no passwords or sensitive pieces of information were stolen or hacked.” The New York Times published their article featuring insider information from Christopher Wiley who worked for SEL group from 2013 to 2014 and observed the birth of Cambridge Analytica playing a key role in designing their methods, billionaire Robert Mercer America's biggest Republican donor teamed up with Breitbart Steve Bannon and S SEL groups Alexander Knicks to finance a new data-driven approach to Republican campaigning but their initial attempts weren't very productive because they didn't have much data to work with. To fix that they reached out to Cambridge University's psychometric Center who had developed a technique to map personality traits based on Facebook activity using a personality quiz to gain access but the psychometric Center declined to work with SEL group. So SEL then just reached out directly to a professor familiar with the techniques Alexander Kogan and paid $800,000 for him to replicate it and give them all the data he collected. Robert Mercer and Steve Bannon invested fifteen million dollars into whole new company in the US Cambridge Analytica though it was basically just a shell company run by SCL group with Alexander Nix appointed as Cambridge Analytica CEO. Channel 4's reports take things to a whole new level thanks to hidden camera footage that they captured while posing as potential clients in meetings with Cambridge Analytica they've got CEO Alexander Nicks on camera bragging that hey secretly participate in elections around the world by using front companies and subcontractors so that it can’t be traced back to them and also pitch the idea of hiring Ukrainian prostitutes who to seduce political opponents and record the interaction. During these sting conversations it's abundantly clear that Cambridge Analytica up might not just be only about gathering data for the purposes of propaganda there's also just straight-up bribery entrapment and blackmail in there which they mark it as something they do using their third-party network of contractors who are former spies.

Social media should be about connecting people but you're delusional if you don't think that Facebook's massive success isn't entirely about advertising and data mining Facebook isn't the product you were thinking off and hopefully this is the long overdue wake-up call that people need about privacy in the digital age.