Trumps Data Firm Exploited Private Data From Millions of Facebook Users [View all]

[neohippie]

This discussion thread was locked as off-topic by NH Ethylene (a host of the Latest Breaking News forum).

Source: New York Magazine

The data analytics firm that worked for President Trump’s election campaign, Cambridge Analytica, harvested the personal information of tens of millions of Facebook users without their permission, then failed to delete that data when it got caught, according to a new joint-investigation by the New York Times and the Observer of London. Facebook, whose role in the 2016 presidential election was already being widely criticized, suspended Cambridge Analytica’s access to the service on Friday in light of the reports.

The harvested user information, collected under the guise of academic research, included the private social media activity of more than 50 million people. The company was then able to match about 30 million of those users with voter rolls and use that data to build psychographic models aimed at predicting and influencing votes — though the effectiveness of these methods is disputable.

Cambridge Analytica is owned by conservative billionaire Robert Mercer and his daughter, Rebekah, and counted former Trump adviser and Breitbart chairman Stephen Bannon as one of its founders. One of the company’s other founders, Christopher Wylie, told the Times that the leaders of the firm wanted new weapons to “fight a culture war in America,” and that, “rules don’t matter for them. For them, this is a war, and it’s all fair.”

Read more: http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/03/trumps-data-firm-exploited-facebook-data-from-millions.html

---

Facebook kept secret their failure to secure the private data of over 50 million of it's users for over two years, and tried to downplay the impact of their working with the Trump campaign to affect the outcome of the 2016 election

Cambridge Analytica has been at the center of controversy in it's involvement in both the investigation of collusion between Trump and Russia and it's controversial role in the campaign lobbying for interests in the Brexit vote as well.

This week we learned more details about the company and it's troubled relationship with the social media giant.


https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/mar/15/cambridge-analytica-illegal-foreign-donors-leave-eu-arron-banks

A controversial data marketing firm appeared to propose raising money from Brexit-supporting foreign donors on behalf of the Leave.EU campaign, in breach of UK election law.

Cambridge Analytica told the group fronted by Nigel Farage and Arron Banks they could target wealthy people from the US, Canada and Australia on behalf of the pro-Brexit campaign in November 2015, according to a pitch document released by a committee of MPs on Thursday.