A firm closely tied to the Trump campaign exploited data from 50 million Facebook users, The Times found. Facebook just banned the firm. Saturday, March 17, 2018 9:50 AM EDT Cambridge Analytica harvested private information from the Facebook profiles of more than 50 million users without their permission, according to former employees, associates and documents, making it one of the largest data leaks in the social network’s history. How Trump Consultants Exploited the Facebook Data of Millions Cambridge Analytica harvested personal information from a huge swath of the electorate to develop techniques that were later used in the Trump campaign. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/17/us/politics/cambridge-analytica-trump-campaign.html 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. Christopher Wylie, who helped found Cambridge and worked there until late 2014, said of its leaders: “Rules don’t matter for them. For them, this is a war, and it’s all fair.” Details of Cambridge’s acquisition and use of Facebook data have surfaced in several accounts since the business began working on the 2016 campaign, setting off a furious debate about the merits of the firm’s so-called psychographic modeling techniques. But the full scale of the data leak involving Americans has not been previously disclosed — and Facebook, until now, has not acknowledged it. Interviews with a half-dozen former employees and contractors, and a review of the firm’s emails and documents, have revealed that Cambridge not only relied on the private Facebook data but still possesses most or all of the trove. Cambridge paid to acquire the personal information through an outside researcher who, Facebook says, claimed to be collecting it for academic purposes. During a week of inquiries from The Times, Facebook downplayed the scope of the leak and questioned whether any of the data still remained out of its control. But on Friday, the company posted a statement expressing alarm and promising to take action. “This was a scam — and a fraud,” Paul Grewal, a vice president and deputy general counsel at the social network, said in a statement to The Times earlier on Friday. He added that the company was suspending Cambridge Analytica, Mr. Wylie and the researcher, Aleksandr Kogan, a Russian-American academic, from Facebook. “We will take whatever steps are required to see that the data in question is deleted once and for all — and take action against all offending parties,” Mr. Grewal said. Alexander Nix, the chief executive of Cambridge Analytica, and other officials had repeatedly denied obtaining or using Facebook data, most recently during a parliamentary hearing last month. But in a statement to The Times, the company acknowledged that it had acquired the data, though it blamed Mr. Kogan for violating Facebook’s rules and said it had deleted the information as soon as it learned of the problem two years ago. In Britain, Cambridge Analytica is facing intertwined investigations by Parliament and government regulators, who are scrutinizing possible data privacy violations and allegations that it performed illegal work on the “Brexit” campaign. In the United States, Mr. Mercer’s daughter, Rebekah, a board member, Mr. Bannon and Mr. Nix received warnings from their lawyer that it was illegal to employ foreigners in political campaigns, according to company documents and former employees. Congressional investigators have questioned Mr. Nix about the company’s role in the Trump campaign. And the Justice Department’s special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, has demanded the emails of Cambridge Analytica employees who worked for the Trump team as part of his investigation into Russian interference in the election. While the substance of Mr. Mueller’s interest is a closely guarded secret, documents viewed by The Times indicate that the firm’s British affiliate claims to have worked in Russia and Ukraine. And the WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, disclosed in October that Mr. Nix had reached out to him during the campaign in hopes of obtaining private emails belonging to Mr. Trump’s Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton. The documents also raise new questions about Facebook, which is already grappling with intense criticism over the spread of Russian propaganda and fake news. The data Cambridge collected from profiles, a portion of which was viewed by The Times, included details on users’ identities, friend networks and “likes.” “Protecting people’s information is at the heart of everything we do,” Mr. Grewal said. “No systems were infiltrated, and no passwords or sensitive pieces of information were stolen or hacked.” Still, he added, “it’s a serious abuse of our rules.” Reading Voters’ Minds The Bordeaux flowed freely as Mr. Nix and several colleagues sat down for dinner at the Palace Hotel in Manhattan in late 2013, Mr. Wylie recalled in an interview. They had much to celebrate. Mr. Nix, a brash salesman, led the small elections division at SCL Group, a political and defense contractor. He had spent much of the year trying to break into the lucrative new world of political data, recruiting Mr. Wylie, then a 24-year-old political operative with ties to veterans of President Obama’s campaigns. Mr. Wylie was interested in using inherent psychological traits to affect voters’ behavior and had assembled a team of psychologists and data scientists, some of them affiliated with Cambridge University. The group experimented abroad, including in the Caribbean and Africa, where privacy rules were lax or nonexistent and politicians employing SCL were happy to provide government-held data, former employees said. Then a chance meeting bought Mr. Nix into contact with Mr. Bannon, the Breitbart News firebrand who would later become a Trump campaign and White House adviser, and with Mr. Mercer, one of the richest men on earth. Mr. Nix and his colleagues courted Mr. Mercer, who believed a sophisticated data company could make him a kingmaker in Republican politics, and his daughter Rebekah, who shared his conservative views. Mr. Bannon was intrigued by the possibility of using personality profiling to shift America’s culture and rewire its politics, recalled Mr. Wylie and other former employees, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they had signed nondisclosure agreements. Through a spokeswoman, Mr. Bannon declined to comment. Mr. Mercer agreed to help finance a $1.5 million pilot project to poll voters and test psychographic messaging in Virginia’s gubernatorial race in November 2013, where the Republican attorney general, Ken Cuccinelli, ran against Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic fund-raiser. Though Mr. Cuccinelli lost, Mr. Mercer committed to moving forward. The Mercers wanted results quickly, and more business beckoned. In early 2014, the investor Toby Neugebauer and other wealthy conservatives were preparing to put tens of millions of dollars behind a presidential campaign for Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, work that Mr. Nix was eager to win. When Mr. Wylie’s colleagues failed to produce a memo explaining their work to Mr. Neugebauer, Mr. Nix castigated them over email. “ITS 2 PAGES!! 4 hours work max (or an hour each). What have you all been doing??” he wrote. Mr. Wylie’s team had a bigger problem. Building psychographic profiles on a national scale required data the company could not gather without huge expense. Traditional analytics firms used voting records and consumer purchase histories to try to predict political beliefs and voting behavior. But those kinds of records were useless for figuring out whether a particular voter was, say, a neurotic introvert, a religious extrovert, a fair-minded liberal or a fan of the occult. Those were among the psychological traits the firm claimed would provide a uniquely powerful means of designing political messages. Mr. Wylie found a solution at Cambridge University’s Psychometrics Centre. Researchers there had developed a technique to map personality traits based on what people had liked on Facebook. The researchers paid users small sums to take a personality quiz and download an app, which would scrape some private information from the their profiles and those of their friends, activity that Facebook permitted at the time. The approach, the scientists said, could reveal more about a person than their parents or romantic partners knew — a claim that has been disputed. When the Psychometrics Centre declined to work with the firm, Mr. Wylie found someone who would: Dr. Kogan, who was then a psychology professor at the university and knew of the techniques. Dr. Kogan built his own app and in June 2014 began harvesting data for Cambridge Analytica. The business covered the costs — more than $800,000 — and allowed him to keep a copy for his own research, according to company emails and financial records. All he divulged to Facebook, and to users in fine print, was that he was collecting information for academic purposes, the social network said. It did not verify his claim. Dr. Kogan declined to provide details of what happened, citing nondisclosure agreements with Facebook and Cambridge Analytica, though he maintained that his program was “a very standard vanilla Facebook app.” He ultimately provided over 50 million raw profiles to the firm, Mr. Wylie said, a number confirmed by a company email and a former colleague. Of those, roughly 30 million contained enough information, including places of residence, that the company could match users to other records and build psychographic profiles. Only about 270,000 users — those who participated in the survey — had consented to having their data harvested. An email from Dr. Kogan to Mr. Wylie describing traits that could be predicted. Mr. Wylie said the Facebook data was “the saving grace” that let his team deliver the models it had promised the Mercers. “We wanted as much as we could get,” he acknowledged. “Where it came from, who said we could have it — we weren’t really asking.” Mr. Nix tells a different story. Appearing before a parliamentary committee last month, he described Dr. Kogan’s contributions as “fruitless.” (More at above url)
You can be sure that more than this is going on. My company is connected to the medical imaging business. The moment I saw the Brexit bus with the slogan about money saved by the UK's NHS pasted across it, I feet certain I knew how that was picked from other possibilities. I may be incorrect but if just felt.. exactly like the kind of hmmm.. why that one?, I've seen from studies. The dirty secret is the companies use fMRI to aid them but the politicans don't want to be connected to the technique as literally mind-reading sample voter stories could backfire. The pols want to say they have a genuine mandate. It works, it works very effectively. https://www.fastcompany.com/1699985...ped-vote-button-your-brain-help-gop-win-house
In its own way the left is as clueless as the establishment republicans. The themes Trump won on were ideas he had long expressed. Immigration, political correctness, bad trade deals. Do you really think CA came up with "build the wall and deport them all" or "locker her up?" The left is desperate to come up with an explanation that absolves them of being totally out of step with voters. Their true belief, that voters are deplorable racists, did not go over well. They also rejected out of hand the idea that running an elderly woman with a 40 year history of corruption and lying had anything to do with trump's win. So trot out the Russians and now Facebook. Stupid people put their entire lives on FB. Someone took advantage of that, and apparently did it without hacking or otherwise penetrating FB. Boo hoo.
Someone remind this philistine that 3 million more voters favored Hillary over Trump and depressing Dem turnout in key states was the end goal for these troll operations because unlike Cons who would vote for even a child molester like they did in Alabama, Dem voters can be suckered into abstaining with ethics issues.
Actually the real story here is the abuse of 50 million Americans Facebook information in a manner not aligned with the FB privacy policy you agreed to when you joined the website. The issue here involves personal privacy as per user agreements on the web. The other part of the story is the "weaponization" of personal information by political campaigns to either target individuals personally or target groups of people for persuasion. Does it sound similar to the operation that the Russians are running? Well it is. If one major American political party is doing this then I expect both are.
I don't think Facebook is to blame here, my understanding, which is cursory, is that the firm obtained the details through dishonest or illegal means.
Facebook provided the data to Dr. Kogan, a university researcher, who claimed he was collecting information strictly for academic purposes. The researcher was basically just a front for the Cambridge Analytica who funded him with $800,000 to get the information. The plan from Day 1 was to acquire millions of Facebook records for political targeting. "He ultimately provided over 50 million raw profiles to the firm, Mr. Wylie said, a number confirmed by a company email and a former colleague. Of those, roughly 30 million contained enough information, including places of residence, that the company could match users to other records and build psychographic profiles. Only about 270,000 users — those who participated in the survey — had consented to having their data harvested."
So dishonest means (maybe even illegal). I suppose Facebook shouldn't be off the hook on gross negligence, especially if only few people agreed to the survey as you said. Wouldn't be surprised if DOJ goes HAM, as Equifax still roams scot free
I would be very surprised if facebook was not offered the results of the study and itself therefore similarly complicit. This reminds of the joke about the CIA requesting a budget reduction because their facebook project was such a success.