What are we to make of the revelations published over the weekend, in the Observer and the Times, that Cambridge Analytica, the data-analytics and messaging company financed, in part, by the conservative billionaire Robert Mercer, used tens of millions of ill-gotten Facebook profiles to create algorithms aimed at “breaking” American democracy?
First, that these were not really revelations at all. Reporters from the Guardian, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Das Magazin, and the Intercept have been reporting these facts for years. We knew as early as December, 2015, for instance, that Facebook data obtained without users’ knowledge was being exploited by Cambridge Analytica on behalf of Senator Ted Cruz, who at that time was Mercer’s preferred candidate in the Republican Presidential primaries. Later, when the Mercer family, along with Steve Bannon, came to support Donald Trump, it was no secret that they brought with them Cambridge Analytica, a firm that boasted of being able to parse and influence the electorate through “psychographic” algorithms derived from that data. After Trump won, Alexander Nix, the head of Cambridge Analytica, crowed that the company’s psychographic algorithms had carried the day. (He later retracted that, then reaffirmed it.)
The millions of Facebook accounts in question—as the reporter Michael Schwartz pointed out last March—were mostly culled from the friend networks of people who clicked on a cute personality quiz on the site. A significant number of the initial test-takers, starting in around 2014, were paid freelancers recruited through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk marketplace by a British research company called GSR. They and others who took the quiz likely did not know that they were giving GSR permission to access their Facebook friends’ profiles. If Facebook officials were not aware of this at the time, when GSR sold this data to Cambridge Analytica, they certainly knew it by January, 2017, when the Swiss researchers Hannes Grassegger and Mikael Krogerus published “The Data That Turned the World Upside Down,” a detailed account of how C.A.’s psychological modelling was used by the Trump campaign. (The Guardian recently quoted a former Facebook employee in charge of data security explaining that he “always assumed there was something of a black market” for data obtained by third-party companies such as GSR, and that when he brought this up to his bosses he was discouraged from investigating too deeply. “Do you really want to see what you’ll find?” he says a Facebook executive told him.)
Source:
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/cambridge-analytica-facebook-and-the-revelations-of-open-secrets
