Cambridge Analytica intern left sensitive voter targeting tools online for nearly a year

[CousinIT]

An intern at the Trump campaign data firm, Cambridge Analytica, appears to have left sensitive voter targeting tools online for nearly a year

An intern at the data mining and analysis firm Cambridge Analytica left online for nearly a year what appears to be programming instructions for the voter targeting tools the company used around the time of the election, raising questions about who could have accessed the tools and to what end.

Social media analyst and data scientist Jonathan Albright discovered the election data processing scripts — or programming instructions — on what he said was the intern's personal GitHub account. GitHub, a "Facebook for programmers," is an internet hosting service mostly used for code.

What is more interesting, he said, is how the tool appeared to retrieve people's recent tweets and favorites to "expand" Cambridge Analytica's body of keywords "around specific objects of election 'outrage' sentiment'" — like abortion, citizenship, naturalization, guns, and Planned Parenthood.

Recent reporting has revealed that Russia harnessed and harvested "outrage" sentiment in an attempt to galvanize and sway voters during the campaign. Accounts linked to Russia bought $100,000 worth of Facebook ads between 2015 and 2016, many of which promoted outsider candidates and exploited racial tensions. Similar methods were deployed on Twitter, Google, Instagram, Pinterest — and even Pokemon Go, as CNN reported earlier this week.

Additionally, the intern appeared to have left Cambridge Analytica's Twitter API secret and key online when he uploaded the scripts. The secret and key, which was removed in February, amounts to the account username and password that companies and developers use to search and pull tweets and user profile information from Twitter, Albright explained.

http://www.businessinsider.com/trump-campaign-data-russia-cambridge-analytica-2017-10

[FakeNoose]

1. So glad I don't use FB or Twitter

Anybody who's on there now should consider changing their identities or quitting altogether.

Just sayin'

[BigmanPigman]

2. Ditto!

[LuvLoogie]

3. Bullshit. This is the cover story the trumpskis are going to use when the evidence that Jared

Kushner's company colluded with the Russians. "An intern let the Ruskies see the code. Maybe it was the Chinese. Nobody know's. I'm hearing it's some 400 lb guy in New Jersey"

[CousinIT]

4. Nobody here would be surprised by that. Disgusted, but not surprised. n/t

[janx]

5. I'm not getting that impression after reading the article

and don't necessarily the evidence in it necessarily points in that direction.