Just as with other recent large -
scale data manipulations, from the recent Strava app fiasco to the widescale distribution and spread of fake news on social
media, Cambridge Analytica didn't «hack» our internet
usage and our Facebook information so much as exploit the way the system was naturally designed to work.
The researchers then correlated scores on the hidden depression
scale with individual trends in internet
usage, grouped into three categories: «aggregate,» which indicated how much information was being sent and received over a network, «application,» which indicated the broad category of program that was being used (e.g., email, surfing the web, downloading
media), and «entropy,» which indicated the degree of randomness in information flow (essentially, the extent to which someone was sending and receiving information to multiple net - based resources at once).