The Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data scandal was a huge political scandal in 2018, when Cambridge Analytica gathered millions of data from Facebook's users with no consent, using them for targeting people during presidential elections. The data breach was reported for the first time in 2015 by a journalist for The Guardian, Harry Davies, who reported that the firm was working for a US Republican Senator. The scandal erupted in March 2018, when a former Cambridge Analytica's employee decided to be an anonimous source for The Observer.1
Cambridge Analytica is a British consultancy firm specialized in collecting data and information on users of
major social media platforms (Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter), founded in 2013 by two US entrepreneurs,
Steve Bannon and Robert Mercer. Known for his markedly conservative positions, the billionaire Mercer is
also one of the leading financiers of the far-right website Breitbart News, once headed by former Donald
Trump's strategist and advisor Bannon.
During an interview released to the website Contagious, the CEO of Cambridge Analytica, Alexander Nix, said
that the company was launched to "fulfill the hole left in the republican politic market in the US".
"Republicans", added Nix, "had seen an opportunity to reach the Democrats on issues such as data analysis
and online marketing".
Every day we leave information online about ourselves that could be used for specific purposes: when we buy a particular product on Amazon or a plane ticket, when we visit a certain page on Facebook or read a newspaper rather than another one. If you multiply all of this by the number of active users online, you can hardly imagine the amount of data that could result from all of this.
Generally, the information collected remains anonymous, but considering the accuracy of Cambridge Analytica's algorithms, it is likely to be easy to get true and detailed profiles. In 2014, a researcher from the University of Cambridge - Aleksandr Kogan - created an application called "thisisyourdigitallife" that allowed the production of behavioral predictions of anyone who downloaded it, still based on the activities carried out online by each person. To use it, people could connect to "Facebook Login", which allows you to subscribe to a site without having to create new credentials. 3 The service is free, but as always happens - even with Facebook - the price to pay is very high and consists of sharing your data with the company in question. From this point of view, Facebook has always been transparent, showing all the information to which it would have had access once the registration process was completed.
It has been revealed that Aleksandr Kogan gathered data from 50 million Facebook users and their friends, making Cambridge Analytica a real "machine for propaganda", as an employee of Cambridge Analytica declared. The first problems arose when Cambridge Analytica shared all this information with Facebook, violating its terms of use. Facebook, indeed, prohibits the sharing of data gathered from users with third party, punishing transgressors with the suspension of their accounts, among other things. Facebook suspended Cambridge Analytica from its platform and launched an investigation, claiming that it gave Kogan all the data.
However, Kogan breached the agreement the moment he shared that information with Cambridge Analytica. Another important topic that needs to be discussed concerns the link between Cambridge Analytica and President of the United States Trump, who has been elected in 2017 after a huge election campaign, carried out especially on main social media platforms. Cambridge Analytica worked for two electoral campaigns, besides Trump's one, trying to pinpoint the most persuasive electors and the issues they particularly care about. It has been estimated that voters from 17 states have been daily monitored, with the result that the donations and the votes increased significantly. 4
In 2018, an internal company document, obtained by the British newspaper The Guardian, revealed how Cambridge Analytica said to have reserved a place for Donald Trump at the Oval Office. Christopher Wylie, 31, a former Cambridge Analytica's data consultant, gave that amount of documents to the newspaper, ushering in the scandal that involved up to 80 million Facebook users. Wylie admitted also that he was an anonymous source for an article of The Observer which drew the attention on the scandal for the first time. The 27-pages document, indeed, was developed by people who worked most closely on Mr. Trump's presidential campaign, including a former employee who disclosed the main techniques used to target the US voters with messages regarding the Republican nominee. Surveys, researches, and algorithms have been intensively used to produce 10.000 different ads in the months previous the elections. Experts estimated that the ads have been viewed billions of times by users, so it is not difficult to picture the effect that they could have had on them.
Following Donald Trump's victory in 2017, the above-mentioned document was presented to Cambridge Analytica's employees in New York, Washington and London, in order to demonstrate how the company was part of one of the biggest political scandals lately. Brittany Kaiser5, 30, was Cambridge Analytica's business development director during the scandal and had access to a copy of the same document now revealed by The Guardian, the only newspaper she talked to. Kaiser said she used the document to show campaign's secret methods and to be "committed to human rights", even though Cambridge Analytica's story tells something different. In fact, even though Kaiser did not work for Trump's campaign, she said she gathered information about how it was organized during a discussion with the chief executive Nix, now suspended. Despite the techniques used were not illegal, the scandal that involved Cambridge Analytica highlights the abilities of an industry to track the lives of voters.
Despite the techniques used were not illegal, the scandal that involved Cambridge Analytica highlights the abilities of an industry to track the lives of voters.
This is the reason why Mark Zuckerberg's company had to pay a $5bn penalty for not having been able to keep its users' personal information private. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC)6, which promotes consumers' protection, also announced a lawsuit against the political consulting firm and promoted settlements with Nix and Kogan. On his Facebook profile, CEO and founder Zuckerberg said that his firm has agreed to pay a huge fine and is working hard to change the way it handles user's data. Even though Facebook's fine is one of the highest ever imposed by the US government, that did not satisfy some of FTC's members, who called it insufficient.
In the meantime, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) said that it had reached an agreement with Facebook on the fact that the company had deceived investors about the risk of the incorrect use of people's information. The SEC, which has the power to propose and enforce securities rules, believes that Facebook found out about Cambridge Analytica's misuse in 2015, but did not do anything for more than two years. Facebook also said the reporters that it was no evidence of wrongdoing, SEC added. SEC's settlement also included a $100.000 fine, but Facebook never admitted nor denied those claims.7
«This data breach had an impact also on Facebook users, whose likes, posts and shares significantly decreased since 2018»
Cambridge Analytica's scandal had a lot of consequences and provoked the reactions of several companies which abandoned Facebook or suspended it from using their services, as it happened with Amazon Web Services when the Bezos' firm found out that it was gathering personal information from users. The Italian bank UniCredit also stopped its marketing on Facebook.
This data breach had an impact also on Facebook users, whose likes, posts and shares significantly decreased since 2018, even though user's growth kept increasing until the last three months of that year. According to the Associated Press, a non-profit American news agency, another company run by Cambridge Analytica's former head of product has been working for the re-election of President Donald J. Trump in November 2020.