Mercer-Backed, Trump-Hired Cambridge Analytics Scraped Private FB Data, Possibly Illegally

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In today's edition of Drain The Swamp™, we've got Cambridge Analytics, the data analytics firmed heavily backed by the Mercer family (of Breitbart.com fame), which had Steve Bannon as a board member, and was hired by the Trump campaign to work up psychological profiles of voters so the campaign could better target their marketing. Cambridge Analytics got private data of ~50m users without their permission, by getting the data through a researcher who claimed to Facebook that he was compiling it for academic purposes. When Facebook discovered the misuse before the election, CA promised/claimed to delete it. It now appears they lied, and Facebook has banned them from the platform altogether.

The potential illegality comes in CA's using foreign citizens to work on an American political campaign.

How Trump Consultants Exploited the Facebook Data of Millions

As the upstart voter-profiling company Cambridge Analytica prepared to wade into the 2014 American midterm elections, it had a problem.

The firm had secured a $15 million investment from Robert Mercer, the wealthy Republican donor, and wooed his political adviser, Stephen K. Bannon, with the promise of tools that could identify the personalities of American voters and influence their behavior. But it did not have the data to make its new products work.

So the firm harvested private information from the Facebook profiles of more than 50 million users without their permission, according to former Cambridge employees, associates and documents, making it one of the largest data leaks in the social network’s history. The breach allowed the company to exploit the private social media activity of a huge swath of the American electorate, developing techniques that underpinned its work on President Trump’s campaign in 2016.

An examination by The New York Times and The Observer of London reveals how Cambridge Analytica’s drive to bring to market a potentially powerful new weapon put the firm — and wealthy conservative investors seeking to reshape politics — under scrutiny from investigators and lawmakers on both sides of the Atlantic.

 

[dreadnought]

In today's edition of Drain The Swamp™, we've got Cambridge Analytics, the data analytics firmed heavily backed by the Mercer family (of Breitbart.com fame), which had Steve Bannon as a board member, and was hired by the Trump campaign to work up psychological profiles of voters so the campaign could better target their marketing. Cambridge Analytics got private data of ~50m users without their permission, by getting the data through a researcher who claimed to Facebook that he was compiling it for academic purposes. When Facebook discovered the misuse before the election, CA promised/claimed to delete it. It now appears they lied, and Facebook has banned them from the platform altogether.

The potential illegality comes in CA's using foreign citizens to work on an American political campaign.

How Trump Consultants Exploited the Facebook Data of Millions

The left is always investigating Donald for something. Maybe they'll find something someday. It seems to me, though, that Donald is a pretty good fellow.