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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsRevealed: 50 million Facebook profiles harvested for Cambridge Analytica in major data breach
Last edited Sat Mar 17, 2018, 01:57 PM - Edit history (1)
The data analytics firm that worked with Donald Trumps election team and the winning Brexit campaign harvested millions of Facebook profiles of US voters, in the tech giants biggest ever data breach, and used them to build a powerful software program to predict and influence choices at the ballot box.
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 Trumps 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 an academic at Cambridge University to obtain the data, told the Observer: We exploited Facebook to harvest millions of peoples profiles. And built models to exploit what we knew about them and target their inner demons. That was the basis that 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.
The New York Times is reporting that copies of the data harvested for Cambridge Analytica could still be found online; its reporting team had viewed some of the raw data.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/17/cambridge-analytica-facebook-influence-us-election
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 Trumps 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 an academic at Cambridge University to obtain the data, told the Observer: We exploited Facebook to harvest millions of peoples profiles. And built models to exploit what we knew about them and target their inner demons. That was the basis that 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.
The New York Times is reporting that copies of the data harvested for Cambridge Analytica could still be found online; its reporting team had viewed some of the raw data.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/17/cambridge-analytica-facebook-influence-us-election
The New York Times article about their investigation:
How Trump Consultants Exploited the Facebook Data of Millions
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 networks 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 Trumps campaign in 2016.
An examination by The New York Times and The Observer of London reveals how Cambridge Analyticas 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.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/17/us/politics/cambridge-analytica-trump-campaign.html
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 networks 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 Trumps campaign in 2016.
An examination by The New York Times and The Observer of London reveals how Cambridge Analyticas 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.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/17/us/politics/cambridge-analytica-trump-campaign.html
If you cant get into the NYT article due to having reached your limit you can get most of the info from the Guardian one. If you can read both I suggest you do.
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Revealed: 50 million Facebook profiles harvested for Cambridge Analytica in major data breach (Original Post)
herding cats
Mar 2018
OP
poboy2
(2,078 posts)1. This is gold. nt
Angry Dragon
(36,693 posts)2. Just another reason not to use Facebook
crazycatlady
(4,492 posts)4. I went cold turkey on FB in 2014
Don't miss it.
There's a few DUers who I see posting here (I lost my password and reregistered) that I miss the insights of on FB though. Other than that, I don't miss the endless stream of MLM posts and Candy Crush requests.
dalton99a
(81,404 posts)3. Kick
Wellstone ruled
(34,661 posts)5. Amazing how this Story once again
surfaces. Several Techies posted numbers in this ball park in 2016 and then nothing. My guess is,it is more like 150 million.