Slate "The Cambridge Analytica Scandal Is What Facebook-Powered Election Cheating Looks Like"

[NRaleighLiberal]

https://slate.com/technology/2018/03/the-cambridge-analytica-scandal-is-what-facebook-powered-election-cheating-looks-like.html

The Trump campaign’s data firm got its hands on 50 million Facebook users’ information—and then reportedly lied about deleting it.

By APRIL GLASER

MARCH 17, 20187:37 PM

On Friday night, as Americans began settling into the weekend, Facebook dropped a pretty substantial piece of news: The company said in a detailed blog post that it had suspended from its platform the political-data firm Cambridge Analytica, which worked with the Trump campaign during the 2016 election, after learning the company hadn’t deleted Facebook user data it had obtained in violation of the social network’s policies.

Facebook said that a Russian-American psychology professor at the University of Cambridge named Dr. Aleksandr Kogan had obtained user data through a personality app he built in 2014 called “thisisyourdigitallife,” which scraped data from the profiles of people who took the quiz as well as that of their friends—something that was allowed under Facebook’s policy for third-party apps at the time. Although only about 270,000 people took the survey, the New York Times reports that Kogan was able to obtain data on 50 million users, likely through connections between friends on the network. While the project promised users the data collection was only for research purposes, it nevertheless funneled the data to Cambridge Analytica, which had funded the development of the app to the tune of $800,000. Kogan had also received funding from the Russian government for his research into the psychology of Facebook users, the Guardian reported.

We don’t yet know how effective Cambridge Analytica’s targeting, based on psychological profiles its CEO has described as its “secret sauce,” truly was, but after working with Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign in the Republican primary, Cambridge Analytica was tapped by the Trump campaign. The company also did data analytics works on the successful Leave.EU campaign that resulted in a vote for Britain to exit the European Union. What we do seem to have, following these revelations about the source of some of the company’s data, is yet another in a long string of instances and coincidences—like the meetings between Trump campaign staff and Russian operatives—that look a lot like a willingness to cheat to win the White House, possibly in violation of the law. And in this case, cheating with data that was taken through Facebook’s front door.

Cambridge Analytica isn’t your typical data analytics firm. Its primary backer is Robert Mercer, the secretive billionaire and former CEO of the New York investment firm Renaissance Technologies whose family is also one of the main funders of Breitbart News and was the largest donor to Trump-backing Super PACs during the 2016 election. Steve Bannon, President Trump’s former chief strategist, was the vice president of Cambridge Analytica’s board at the same time he was chairman of Breitbart News.


snip - read the rest at the above link

[regnaD kciN]

1. If anyone doubts that this sort of "psychographic targeting"...

...wouldn't be enough to subliminally sway the 70,000 voters across three states that made Donald Trump our President, might I suggest they're completely out-of-touch with reality?

(And, of course, since that data remains in the hands of the Republican Party, no matter what slamming-the-barn-door-shut-after-the-horse-has-fled measures Facebook implements now, is there any doubt we'll be seeing the same shenanigans this November, and the November two years thereafter?)