Wait wait Mods.. this isn't some F7 game..
A whistleblower has revealed to the Observer how Cambridge Analytica – a company owned by the hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, and headed at the time by Trump’s key adviser Steve Bannon – used personal information taken without authorisation in early 2014 to build a system that could profile individual US voters, in order to target them with personalised political advertisements.
Christopher Wylie, who worked with a Cambridge University academic to obtain the data, told the Observer: “We exploited Facebook to harvest millions of people’s profiles. And built models to exploit what we knew about them and target their inner demons. That was the basis the entire company was built on.”
Documents seen by the Observer, and confirmed by a Facebook statement, show that by late 2015 the company had found out that information had been harvested on an unprecedented scale. However, at the time it failed to alert users and took only limited steps to recover and secure the private information of more than 50 million individuals.
There's a huge amount of illegality involved in this but the key to extracting data was those silly personality profiles.
The data was collected through an app called thisisyourdigitallife, built by academic Aleksandr Kogan, separately from his work at Cambridge University. Through his company Global Science Research (GSR), in collaboration with Cambridge Analytica, hundreds of thousands of users were paid to take a personality test and agreed to have their data collected for academic use.
However, the app also collected the information of the test-takers’ Facebook friends, leading to the accumulation of a data pool tens of millions-strong. Facebook’s “platform policy” allowed only collection of friends’ data to improve user experience in the app and barred it being sold on or used for advertising. The discovery of the unprecedented data harvesting, and the use to which it was put, raises urgent new questions about Facebook’s role in targeting voters in the US presidential election.
Link
A while ago there was a good story on Target, which could predict with 95% accuracy as to whether someone was in early stages of pregnancy based on whether they bought 12 of a group of 20 products. Imagine what your history of likes and posts and certainly filling in quizzes such as 'what xx are you?'
For example in studying Liberal Democrats in the UK they found that the main correlation was 'open to new experiences', so they could then target advertising based on 'here's a new way of thinking about things..' to push a Conservative agenda.
There's a lot of articles out in NYT and The Guardian, and more will appear. It's very clear that at least Bannon and Mercer were directly involved, there's strong Russia links and this all leads up to one man obviously though whether he specifically colluded is still, in my mind, unproven.
Regardless..
Should their be greater laws over data protection, and our ownership of our data even on other platforms?
Should this level of psychographic information be allowed in advertising for elections?
In answering you can also not what Star Wars Character are you so I can profile you for my new Porg sex toy products.
