WASHINGTON — The political action committee founded by John R. Bolton, President Trump's incoming national security adviser, was one of the earliest customers of Cambridge Analytica, which it hired specifically to develop
psychological profiles of voters with data harvested from tens of millions of Facebook profiles, according to former Cambridge employees and company documents.
Not exact matches
The project is detailed in the contract as a seven step process —
with Kogan's company, GSR, generating an initial seed sample (though it does not specify how large this is here) using «online panels»; analyzing this seed training data using its own «psychometric inventories» to try to determine personality categories; the next step is Kogan's personality quiz app being deployed on Facebook to gather the full dataset from respondents and also to scrape a subset
of data from their Facebook friends (here it notes: «upon consent
of the respondent, the GS Technology scrapes and retains the respondent's Facebook
profile and a quantity
of data on that respondent's Facebook friends»); step 4 involves the psychometric data from the seed sample, plus the Facebook
profile data and friend data all being run through proprietary modeling algorithms — which the contract specifies are based on using Facebook likes to predict personality scores,
with the stated aim
of predicting the «
psychological, dispositional and / or attitudinal facets
of each Facebook record»; this then generates a series
of scores per Facebook
profile; step 6 is to match these psychometrically scored
profiles with voter record data held by SCL —
with the goal
of matching (and thus scoring) at least 2M
voter records for targeting
voters across the 11 states; the final step is for matched records to be returned to SCL, which would then be in a position to craft messages to
voters based on their modeled psychometric scores.
In the event, Chmieliauskas» suggestion to clone Kosinski's app led to CA's data licensing relationship
with Kogan, whose own personality test app — thisisyourdigitallife — was built bespoke for its project and successfully used to harvest data on 50M + Facebook users so CA could, in turn, build
psychological profiles on millions
of American
voters.
While at C.A., Wylie claims he was tasked
with compiling
psychological profiles of voters using Facebook data, claims that he told the New York Times and the London Observer.
In the event, Chmieliauskas» suggestion to clone Kosinski's app led to CA's data licensing relationship
with Kogan, whose own personality test app — thisisyourdigitallife — was built bespoke for its project and successfully used to harvest data on 50M + Facebook users so CA could, in turn, build
psychological profiles on millions
of American
voters.
And now, thanks to a whistleblower and two stunning reports in the Observer and the New York Times, we know that one
of those developers siphoned data on more than 50 million Facebook users and shared them
with the Trump campaign's
voter targeting firm, Cambridge Analytica — a company that has bragged it has
psychological profiles on 230 million American
voters, which it uses to target people online
with emotionally precise digital messaging to influence elections.
The upcoming hearing comes in response to a controversy
with Cambridge Analytica, a firm that aided Trump and other Republican political candidates by building
psychological profiles of voters.
All
of this data was forwarded to Cambridge Analytica, which rolled it up
with data from other sources to build
psychological profiles of potential
voters.
The project is detailed in the contract as a seven step process —
with Kogan's company, GSR, generating an initial seed sample (though it does not specify how large this is here) using «online panels»; analyzing this seed training data using its own «psychometric inventories» to try to determine personality categories; the next step is Kogan's personality quiz app being deployed on Facebook to gather the full dataset from respondents and also to scrape a subset
of data from their Facebook friends (here it notes: «upon consent
of the respondent, the GS Technology scrapes and retains the respondent's Facebook
profile and a quantity
of data on that respondent's Facebook friends»); step 4 involves the psychometric data from the seed sample, plus the Facebook
profile data and friend data all being run through proprietary modeling algorithms — which the contract specifies are based on using Facebook likes to predict personality scores,
with the stated aim
of predicting the «
psychological, dispositional and / or attitudinal facets
of each Facebook record»; this then generates a series
of scores per Facebook
profile; step 6 is to match these psychometrically scored
profiles with voter record data held by SCL —
with the goal
of matching (and thus scoring) at least 2M
voter records for targeting
voters across the 11 states; the final step is for matched records to be returned to SCL, which would then be in a position to craft messages to
voters based on their modeled psychometric scores.
The committee recently took evidence from Cambridge Analytica — the UK based company credited
with helping Donald Trump win the US presidency by creating
psychological profiles of US
voters for ad targeting purposes.
Cambridge Analytica, whose clients have included Donald Trump's presidential campaign, reportedly used the data
of 50 million Facebook customers without permission to build
psychological profiles so
voters could be targeted
with ads and stories.