Cambridge Analytica, the political consulting company that worked with Trump’s campaign and collected raw data from as many as 87 million Facebook users, is closing its doors.
There’s a pretty tangled network explaining how Trump’s campaign, Cambridge Analytica, and Facebook all connect – my colleague Andrew Prokop breaks it down well in this great article.
If you want a quick refresher on how everything fits together, this diagram really clears things up.
1) Here’s the simple version of what happened
Facebook gave access to data from up to 87 million users to a researcher who was connected with Cambridge Analytica, which in turn worked for Trump’s campaign.
2) So how does the Trump campaign tie into Cambridge Analytica?
Cambridge Analytica came about when Steve Bannon asked big conservative donors Rebekah and Robert Mercer to back a political consulting firm. Bannon took on the role of vice president there, and during the 2016 election he introduced Cambridge Analytica to Trump’s team.
Of course, Bannon later became one of Trump’s top advisers before leaving in August 2017.
Now, what about SCL Group? That company is behind much of Cambridge Analytica’s work. It’s basically a PR and messaging outfit with clients worldwide. As Vox’s Andrew Prokop explains:
SCL often talks about itself in grand terms – calling its skills ”psychological warfare” and “influence operations.” They say their deep understanding of human psychology helps them target people with messages that sway opinions toward their clients’ goals.
Basically, as the New York Times puts it, Cambridge Analytica acts mostly like a front for SCL Group.
3 ) How did Cambridge Ana ly t i c a get hold of all this data?
The CEO at Cambridge Analytica , Alexander Nix , reportedly contacted Wiki Leaks founder Julian Assange about emails hacked from the Democratic National Committee servers , according to The Wall Street Journal.But really , the key part here is where they got their Facebook info. According to someone who used to work there , they got it through Aleksandr Kogan , a Russian American researcher at University of Cambridge.
4 ) How did Kogan manage to grab data from up to 87 million Facebook profiles?
Kogan created a Facebook app that was basically just a quiz.
Kogan’s app gathered info not only from people taking the quiz but also exploited a loophole in Facebook’s API that let him collect data from friends of those who played along too , as my co-worker Aja Romano points out.
<p class= "duit—artikel—gefährlich—gesetzt—cms—markup duit—artikel—Standardabsatz_۱agbrxi_lg۸a_c۵۱_lg۸a_c۵۰_xk_p۰c_g۱" Aja also highlights that even though Facebook banned selling information obtained this way , Cambridge Analytica went ahead and sold it anyway .
Why This Is More About Facebook Than Just Cambridge Analytica
<p class= "duit__artikel__gefährlich__gesetzt__cms__markup duit__artikel__Standardabsatz_۱agbrxi_lg۸a_c۵۱_lg۸a_c۵۰_xk_p۰c_g۱" Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg responded by saying , “I’ve been working to understand exactly what happened and how to make sure this doesn’t happen again. The good news is that the most important actions to prevent this from happening again today we have already taken years ago. But we also made mistakes, there’s more to do, and we need to step up and do it.”
<p class= "duit__artikel__gefährlich__gesetzt__cms__markup duit__artikel__Standardabsatz_۱agbrxi_lg۸a_c۵۱_lg۸a_c۵۰_xk_p۰c_g۱" Past employees at Facebook have said there has always been tension between security teams wanting better user protection versus legal or policy folks focusing on making money for the company .
“The people whose job is to protect the user always are fighting an uphill battle against the people whose job is to make money for the company,” Sandy Parakilas, who worked on privacy at Facebook, told The New York Times.
It might be worth mentioning that some think Cambridge Analytica didn’t actually play much role in getting Trump elected; folks in political consulting don’t rate them very highly.
Still though, this whole thing sparks bigger questions about trusting Facebook with your info. They let some third-party developer build something just so they could gather tons of data-and then exploited loopholes letting them pull info not just on users but also their friends without anyone really knowing.
Right now though it seems like it’s mostly Cambridge Analytica facing backlash after losing several clients thanks to all this bad press over past months.
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