The company revealed that as many as 87 million people — 30 million more people than were originally estimated — may have had their personal data misappropriated by
the voter profiling firm Cambridge Analytica and used for political influence.
Facebook revealed on Friday that
a voter profiling firm hired by Donald Trump and other Republicans had improperly used data from 270,000 users of the social media platform.
Other strategic information could include: connected third party application data; comments and likes on public Facebook pages; internet browsing history through Facebook APIs and scripts; consumer loyalty programs, mobile app logins; publicly shared photos and profile information that users forget about; and (I'm presuming) more mundane tactics such as harnessing unassuming personality «quizzes» on Facebook that capture invaluable psychometric data people readily share with their friends and families, but not with a psychological
voter profiling firm.
Over two days of testimony before Congress earlier this month, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg dodged a litany of questions from lawmakers about how the data of 87 million Americans ended up in the hands of
voter profiling firm Cambridge Analytica.
This technique, once widely used but now severely restricted, meant that officials affiliated with
the voter profiling firm, Cambridge Analytica, could gain access to basic demographics and the Facebook «likes» of all of the friends of the 270,000 people who downloaded an app called «thisisyourdigitallife.»
Facebook revealed on Friday that
a voter profiling firm hired by Donald Trump and other Republicans had improperly used data from 270,000 users of the social media platform.
Not exact matches
That information should have remained with Kogan, but he instead gave it to Cambridge Analytica, an analytics
firm best known for its work on the Donald Trump campaign, which used it to build
profiles on potential
voters for GOP candidates.
But the exposed database combined people's personal information and political inclinations — including proprietary information gathered via predictive modeling tools — to create a detailed
profile of nearly 200 million Americans that would be a «gold mine» for anyone looking to target and manipulate
voters, said Archie Agarwal, the founder of the cybersecurity
firm ThreatModeler.
It was Zuckerberg's job in the hearing to provide reassurance in the wake of the news that political data
firm Cambridge Analytica harvested information from more than 87 million Facebook users to create
voter profiles that were used by Donald Trump's presidential campaign.
The consulting
firm relied on Facebook data to
profile and target
voters while advising the Trump campaign in 2016.
Cambridge Analytica, which rose to prominence through its work with Mr. Trump's 2016 election campaign, has found itself confronting a deepening crisis since reports this past weekend in The New York Times and The Observer of London that the
firm had harvested the data from more than 50 million Facebook
profiles in its bid to develop techniques for predicting the behavior of individual American
voters.
The personal information of up to 87 million Facebook users ended up in the hands of the
voter -
profiling firm Cambridge Analytica, which worked with the Trump campaign in the 2016 presidential election.
The data collected by the app reportedly was shared with Cambridge Analytica and used to help the
firm build
profiles of individual
voters and their political preferences to better target advertising to them.
This was Mr. Zuckerberg's first appearance before Congress, prompted by the revelation that Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting
firm linked to the Trump campaign, harvested the data of an estimated 87 million Facebook users to psychologically
profile voters during the 2016 election.
Earlier this week, a whistleblower claimed that Cambridge Analytica, a London - headquartered political consultancy and data analytics
firm, had used data collected from millions of Facebook
profiles to gain an understanding of American
voter behaviour.
On March 17, the Guardian and the New York Times both published stories showing that
voter -
profiling firm Cambridge Analytica was able to harvest data on 50 million — now 87 million — Facebook
profiles without user permission.
LONDON — Conservative strategist Stephen K. Bannon oversaw Cambridge Analytica's early efforts to collect troves of Facebook data as part of an ambitious program to build detailed
profiles of millions of American
voters, a former employee of the data - science
firm said Tuesday.
That's the question many Americans are asking after revelations that a data - mining
firm working for the Trump campaign improperly got its hands on the personal information of tens of millions of Facebook users and created detailed
profiles that were used to target unsuspecting
voters in the presidential election.
Cambridge Analytica, a
firm that specializes in using online data to create
voter personality
profiles in order to target users with political messages, ran data operations for Donald Trump's presidential campaign.
Kogan later passed this information on to
voter -
profiling firm Cambridge Analytica, which claimed (but now denies) that it used the data to craft political ads for President Trump's 2016 election.
It stands accused of harvesting Facebook user data to
profile voters that that were ultimately targeted by the Trump campaign, which spent over $ 6 million on information obtained by the
firm.
But what sets Cambridge Analytica apart from other data
firms is that it claims to use what's known as psychographics to build its
voter profiles.
Cambridge Analytica, which rose to prominence through its work with Mr. Trump's 2016 election campaign, has found itself confronting a deepening crisis since reports this past weekend in The New York Times and The Observer of London that the
firm had harvested the data from more than 50 million Facebook
profiles in its bid to develop techniques for predicting the behavior of individual American
voters.
Part of the work the
firm performed for Bolton's super PAC was psychographic
voter targeting that it claimed could
profile voters based on certain characteristics.
LONDON — Conservative strategist Stephen K. Bannon oversaw Cambridge Analytica's early efforts to collect troves of Facebook data as part of an ambitious program to build detailed
profiles of millions of American
voters, a former employee of the data - science
firm said Tuesday.
Conservative strategist Steve Bannon oversaw Cambridge Analytica's early efforts to collect troves of Facebook data as part of an ambitious program to build detailed
profiles of millions of American
voters, a former employee of the data - science
firm...
Why, after British journalists exposed in 2015 that the presidential campaign of Sen. Ted Cruz targeted
voters online using the resulting 40 million - plus psychological
profiles — acquired by the
firm Cambridge Analytica, backed by megadonor Robert Mercer — Facebook did not follow through on a pledge to ensure the data destroyed.
Clinton also cited the Trump campaign's use of the controversial GOP
firm Cambridge Analytica, which boasts of «psychographic»
profiles of
voters based heavily on Facebook information.
That
firm then used the data to build «psychographic
profiles» about
voters.
The
firm is now at the center of reports that it exploited Facebook data and harvested millions of U.S.
voter profiles without user authorization during the 2016 presidential campaign.
Cambridge Analytica, a
firm that specializes in using online data to create
voter personality
profiles in order to target users with political messages, ran data operations for Donald Trump's presidential campaign.
This week, Facebook admitted that as many as 87 million users may have had their data «improperly shared» with the
voter profiling data analytics
firm Cambridge Analytica.
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.
Mr. Nix has said that the
firm's
profiles helped shape Mr. Trump's strategy — statements disputed by other campaign officials — but also that Cambridge did not have enough time to comprehensively model Trump
voters.
Read also: Trump - linked data
firm Cambridge Analytica harvested data on 50 million Facebook
profiles to help target
voters
On this week's If Then, Slate's April Glaser and Will Oremus dissect the latest fallout from the Facebook Cambridge Analytica scandal, wherein the
profile data of more than 50 million Facebook users was obtained and allegedly used by Donald Trump's online
voter - targeting
firm.
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.
LONDON — Conservative strategist Stephen K. Bannon oversaw Cambridge Analytica's early efforts to collect troves of Facebook data as part of an ambitious program to build detailed
profiles of millions of American
voters, a former employee of the data - science
firm said Tuesday.
The data collected by the app reportedly was shared with Cambridge Analytica and used to help the
firm build
profiles of individual
voters and their political preferences to better target advertising to them.
A loophole allowed a prominent data analytics
firm that worked with President Trump's campaign exploit user data to harvest 50 million
profiles of U.S.
voters without their permission, according to a whistleblower who once worked to help acquire the data.
The information data
firm Cambridge Analytica used to create 30 million «psychographic
profiles» about
voters originally came from a third - party app like FarmVille that users gave permission to access their data circa 2014.
The
firm believed those
profiles were better predictors of how
voters could be swayed through targeted ads than traditional data on party registration and voting patterns.
On Saturday, whistleblower Christopher Wylie said the
firm had used that personal data without permission to
profile US
voters and influence their decisions.
As Facebook faces fallout from a major scandal involving the use of its data by Cambridge Analytica, a British
firm that
profiled and targeted
voters...
Cambridge Analytica, which rose to prominence through its work with Mr. Trump's 2016 election campaign, has found itself confronting a deepening crisis since reports this past weekend in The New York Times and The Observer of London that the
firm had harvested the data from more than 50 million Facebook
profiles in its bid to develop techniques for predicting the behavior of individual American
voters.
The
firm took the psychographic
profiles it was building off the Facebook data at the time and combined them with
voter databases and other sets of data.
The data
firm started partnering with U.S. political campaigns around 2015 with the promise that it had the ability to do what it called «psychographic» targeting, which allowed Cambridge Analytica to create psychological
profiles to «effectively engage and persuade
voters using specially tailored language and visual ad combinations» that appeal to each person on an emotional level, according to Cambridge Analytica's website.
His «super PAC» was one of the earliest customers of Cambridge Analytica, which has found itself confronting a deepening crisis after reports last weekend that the
firm had harvested the data from more than 50 million Facebook
profiles in its bid to develop techniques for predicting the behavior of individual American
voters.
Part of the work the
firm performed for Bolton's super PAC was psychographic
voter targeting that it claimed could
profile voters based on certain characteristics.
Read more: Trump - linked data
firm Cambridge Analytica harvested data on 50 million Facebook
profiles to help target
voters Data breach exposes Cambridge Analytica's data mining tools How Cambridge Analytica used your Facebook data to help elect Trump Cambridge Analytica: The future of political data is in the enterprise Cambridge Analytica: «We know what you want before you want it» Election tech: The truth about the impact of political big data