Cambridge Analytica
A Facebook personality quiz gave Cambridge Analytica access to data from millions of people who had never taken it. Former employee Christopher Wylie brought the company’s practices to wider attention in 2018.
Researcher Aleksandr Kogan’s app asked Facebook users to take a personality test. It also collected information about people on their friends lists. The Federal Trade Commission put the number of direct users in the hundreds of thousands and the number of friends whose data was collected in the tens of millions.
In March 2018, Christopher Wylie gave evidence to a British parliamentary committee. He described how Kogan came to supply the data and said he had access to it himself. He told lawmakers he deleted his copy in 2015 and confirmed the deletion to Facebook when the company contacted him the following year.
The FTC concluded in 2019 that Cambridge Analytica had misled users about the personal information the app collected. Its order required the company to delete the data and work derived from it. The record establishes how the data was obtained and used for targeting. It leaves open how much the targeting affected voters’ decisions.
A related topic is Deepfakes.
Bibliography:
- UK House of Commons Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee. (2018, March 27). Oral evidence: Fake news. HC 363. Testimony of Christopher Wylie.
- Federal Trade Commission. (2019, November 25). In the Matter of Cambridge Analytica, LLC. Commission opinion, Docket No. 9389.