How Trump Consultants Exploited the Facebook Data of Millions

[DonViejo]

By MATTHEW ROSENBERG, NICHOLAS CONFESSORE and CAROLE CADWALLADRMARCH 17, 2018

LONDON — 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.


more
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/17/us/politics/cambridge-analytica-trump-campaign.html

[Sophia4]

1. I have not been able to bring myself to go to Facebook or look at it since

a few weeks after the election.

Just too political in an ugly way. It was just horrible, and I could not enjoy it at all.

[dameatball]

2. ahhhh.....i can see the tip of this iceberg from my back yard

[MineralMan]

3. Was it Candy Crush? Or one of the other Worthless Games

on Facebook that you turn over everything to to play? All of those Facebook apps have a singular goal: to gain access to the profiles of your entire list of FB friends. Once they do, they have marketable information.

[LeftInTX]

5. It talks about "data leak", but how is it a leak if you consent to these games etc?

I also have people who friend me just to get access to my friends' list.
Local politicians and candidates have huge friend lists. (They usually have two fb profiles - professional and personal) Their professional profile is the one with the large friend list.

[MineralMan]

8. People don't pay any attention to what they're giving away.

I keep my friends list down to just, well, friends. Even so, many of those have signed up for games, etc. I know that because those games invite you to join in, once they get your name from that friend.

My FB page is friends only. Nobody else can read it.

[Stallion]

4. Thanks-This Article is Gold to Understand Exactly What Cambridge Analytica Does

[octoberlib]

6. This is excellent reporting!

The article also states that CA violated federal election law by using foreign workers in American political campaigns starting with Senator Thom Tillis’s run against Democrat Kay Hagan. Oh and Aleksandr Kogan , who’s mentioned in the article is an associate professor at St. Petersburg state university in Russia and was using Russian research grants to research Facebook users and their posts.

[octoberlib]

7. Thanks for posting this, DonViejo!

Everybody’s talking about McCabe but I think this is even more important.

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

9. Slimey fuckers aren't they