Revealed: 50 million Facebook profiles harvested for Cambridge Analytica in major data breach

[LeftishBrit]

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.”...


The data was collected through an app called thisisyourdigitallife, built by academic Aleksandr Kogan, separately from his work at Cambridge University. Through his company Global Science Research (GSR), in collaboration with Cambridge Analytica, hundreds of thousands of users were paid to take a personality test and agreed to have their data collected for academic use.

However, the app also collected the information of the test-takers’ Facebook friends, leading to the accumulation of a data pool tens of millions-strong. Facebook’s “platform policy” allowed only collection of friends data to improve user experience in the app and barred it being sold on or used for advertising.


(More at link)

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/17/cambridge-analytica-facebook-influence-us-election

[Squinch]

1. And still no boycott.

[syringis]

2. Hello LeftishBrit

I wonder if they have somethibg to do with the Brexit ?

[LeftishBrit]

3. Some conflicting evidence there

First Leave.eu and Cambridge Analytica said they did work together; now Arron Banks says that they had some initial discussions, but that no paid work was involved in the end. I'm inclined to believe what they said the first time, but probably it will be clarified more as time goes on:

https://uk.news.yahoo.com/explainer-links-between-cambridge-analytica-brexit-campaign-group-094829481--finance.html

[muriel_volestrangler]

4. There is also the linked firm AggregateIQ:

In Northern Ireland, Sinn Féin asked the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) to investigate the DUP's use of Cambridge Analytica-linked firm AggregrateIQ in last year's assembly election and its Brexit campaign for the EU referendum.
...
The company received more than £4.6m from Brexit campaign groups – more than any other company in the 2016 referendum.
...
AggregrateIQ is thought to have 'micro-targeted' voters with political advertising on social media using their personal data.

It has been linked to a similar firm, Cambridge Analytica. The DUP has declined to explain what it paid AggregateIQ to do, but insisted its campaigns "meet all legal and regulatory conditions".

https://www.irishnews.com/magazine/technology/2018/03/22/news/mark-zuckerberg-apologises-over-cambridge-analytica-scandal-1285246/

It was with AggregateIQ that Vote Leave (the official Leave campaign) chose to spend £3.9m, more than half its official £7m campaign budget. As did three other affiliated Leave campaigns: BeLeave, Veterans for Britain and the Democratic Unionist party, spending a further £757,750. “Coordination” between campaigns is prohibited under UK electoral law, unless campaign expenditure is declared, jointly. It wasn’t. Vote Leave says the Electoral Commission “looked into this” and gave it “a clean bill of health”.
...
Who’s Chris Wylie?

“He’s the one who brought data and micro-targeting [individualised political messages] to Cambridge Analytica. And he’s from west Canada. It’s only because of him that AggregateIQ exist. They’re his friends. He’s the one who brought them in.”

There wasn’t just a relationship between Cambridge Analytica and AggregateIQ, Paul told me. They were intimately entwined, key nodes in Robert Mercer’s distributed empire. “The Canadians were our back office. They built our software for us. They held our database. If AggregateIQ is involved then Cambridge Analytica is involved. And if Cambridge Analytica is involved, then Robert Mercer and Steve Bannon are involved. You need to find Chris Wylie.”

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/07/the-great-british-brexit-robbery-hijacked-democracy

[muriel_volestrangler]

5. Cambridge Analytica misled MPs over work for Leave.EU, says ex-director

Cambridge Analytica conducted data research for one of the leading Brexit campaign groups and then misled the public and MPs over the work the company had undertaken, according to a former employee who has spoken to the Guardian.

In an exclusive interview, Brittany Kaiser, Cambridge Analytica’s business development director until two weeks ago, said the work with Leave.EU involved analysis of data provided by Ukip.

Emails and other documents, seen by the Guardian, show the company was worried about whether it could speak openly about the “interesting findings” and the origins of the data that had been analysed. It decided against doing so.

Kaiser, 30, said the work took a number of weeks and involved “at least six or seven meetings” with senior officials from Leave.EU, which was co-founded by Arron Banks, a Ukip donor. She said the work took place as part of an effort to secure formal business with the campaign group.

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/23/cambridge-analytica-misled-mps-over-work-for-leave-eu-says-ex-director-brittany-kaiser

What a surprise.