How Cambridge Analytica hijacked 50 million Facebook profiles

[dalton99a]

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/17/facebook-cambridge-analytica-kogan-data-algorithm

How Cambridge Analytica turned Facebook ‘likes’ into a lucrative political tool
The algorithm used in the Facebook data breach trawled though personal data for information on sexual orientation, race, gender – and even intelligence and childhood trauma
Carole Cadwalladr and Emma Graham-Harrison
Sat 17 Mar 2018 09.02 EDT

...

The academic (Aleksandr Kogan) had developed a Facebook app which featured a personality quiz, and Cambridge Analytica paid for people to take it, advertising on platforms such as Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.

The app recorded the results of each quiz, collected data from the taker’s Facebook account – and, crucially, extracted the data of their Facebook friends as well.

The scale of the data collection Cambridge Analytica paid for was so large it triggered an automatic shutdown of the app’s ability to harvest profiles. But Kogan told a colleague he “spoke with an engineer” to get the restriction lifted and, within a day or two, work resumed.

Within months, Kogan and Cambridge Analytica had a database of millions of US voters that had its own algorithm to scan them, identifying likely political persuasions and personality traits. They could then decide who to target and craft their messages that was likely to appeal to them – a political approach known as “micro-targeting”.

[cry baby]

1. Just...wow. Fascinating and terrifying. nt

[UCmeNdc]

2. Look at Donald Trump campaign finance reports