Carole Cadwalladr & Emma Graham-Harrison - 50 million Facebook profiles harvested for Cambridge Analytica in major data breach // How Facebook’s destructive ethos imperils democracy
Whistleblower
describes how firm linked to former Trump adviser Steve Bannon compiled user
data to target American voters
The data analytics
firm that worked with Donald Trump’s election team and the winning Brexit
campaign harvested millions of Facebook profiles
of US voters, in the tech giant’s biggest ever data breach, and used them to
build a powerful software program to predict and influence choices at the
ballot box. 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.
How Facebook’s destructive ethos imperils democracy
The revelations in our lead story today are shocking not just
because they reveal the extent to which Facebook’s advertising system was
exploited for political purposes in the 2016 election, but also because
they demonstrate the company’s inability to comprehend the responsibilities
that accompany its newfound power. The revelations show
that a data analytics firm was able to harvest the Facebook profiles of about a
third of all US Facebook users, which were then used to construct psychological
models of those individuals for campaign purposes. This was no
run-of-the-mill cybercrime heist that merely stole credit card details. The
information that Facebook holds on its users (at least 98 data points per user) is deeply revealing – including
of their tastes, preferences, habits, sexuality, politics, hopes and
fears. Academic research has shown that even knowledge of a few “Likes” can
reveal an astonishing amount about an individual Facebook user. For political
campaigners, this is the purest gold dust, because it enables messages to be
precisely calibrated, and for this to be done at a scale that was unimaginable
in the pre-internet era.
No one can pretend Facebook is just harmless fun any more
Christopher Wylie, who worked with an academic at Cambridge University 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 that the entire company was built on.” Documents seen by the Observer, and confirmed by a Facebook statement, show that by late 2015 the company had found out that information had been harvested on an unprecedented scale. However, at the time it failed to alert users and took only limited steps to recover and secure the private information of more than 50 million individuals.
The New York
Times is reporting that copies of the data harvested for Cambridge
Analytica could still be found online; its reporting team had viewed some of
the raw data. 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. The discovery of the
unprecedented data harvesting, and the use to which it was put, raises urgent
new questions about Facebook’s role in targeting voters in the US presidential
election... read more:
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/17/cambridge-analytica-facebook-influence-us-election
