Late last week, the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) confirmed 30 organisations, including Facebook, were being investigated as part of a national inquiry into the use of personal data and analytics for political and commercial purposes.
It came weeks after the regulatory body was granted a warrant to search Cambridge Analytica’s (CA) headquarters in London, the political consulting firm at the heart of the data leak scandal.
But how were they able to access and harness Facebook users’ data for their political partners and clients, and how will that impact people going forward?
This Is Your Digital Life
CA’s mass data-mining project began in June 2014, when, according to its co-founder Christopher Wylie, a commercial data-sharing deal was signed between SCL Elections (CA’s parent company) and Global Science Research (GSR), an organisation owned by Cambridge University lecturer Aleksandr Kogan.
The psychology professor created a quiz app called This Is Your Digital Life, with which data would be extracted from personality tests taken by its users and given to CA. The firm then advertised the app on an Amazon web service and paid participants up to $5 to encourage take-up, but only US voters with a Facebook account were eligible to take part. Their responses were then paired with information taken from their social media profile, including their gender, age, relationship status, location and ‘likes’, to establish their personality traits and political views.
Within months, around 320,000 Facebook users had downloaded the app, exposing both their profiles and those belonging to their Facebook Friends – around 87 million in total – as the social network allowed apps to retrieve such data at the time.
Those individuals were then linked to electoral records obtained by SCL, and targeted with highly personalized political advertising for CA’s partners and clients.
President Trump and Brexit
CEO Alexander Nix has previously said CA was a major player in Donald Trump’s election in 2016, telling undercover reporters that the company “ran all the digital campaign” for the Republican candidate.
The company also received payments totaling almost $6 million from Trump’s campaign team in 2016, according to government records, yet they have since vehemently downplayed CA’s role in their success.
In a statement released in October, campaign director Michael Glassner said data analysis was managed solely by the Republican National Committee and “any claims that voter data from any other source played a key role in the victory are false”.
0 comments: