Cambridge Analytica (nonfiction)
Cambridge Analytica Ltd (CA) was a British political consulting firm which combined misappropriation of digital assets, data mining, data brokerage, and data analysis with strategic communication during the electoral processes. It was started in 2013 as an offshoot of the SCL Group. After closing operations with legal proceedings including bankruptcy, members of the SCL Group have been continuing operations under the legal entity Emerdata Limited. The company closed operations in 2018 in the course of the Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal, although related firms still exist.
The company was partly owned by the family of Robert Mercer, an American hedge-fund manager who supports many politically conservative causes. The firm maintained offices in London, New York City, and Washington, DC. CEO Alexander Nix has said CA was involved in 44 US political races in 2014. In 2015, CA performed data analysis services for Ted Cruz's presidential campaign. In 2016, CA worked for Donald Trump's presidential campaign as well as for Leave.EU (one of the organisations campaigning in the United Kingdom's referendum on European Union membership). CA's role in those campaigns has been controversial and is the subject of ongoing criminal investigations in both countries. Political scientists question CA's claims about the effectiveness of its methods of targeting voters.
In March 2018, multiple media outlets broke news of Cambridge Analytica's business practices. The New York Times and The Observer reported that the company had acquired and used personal data about Facebook users from an external researcher who had told Facebook he was collecting it for academic purposes. Shortly afterwards, Channel 4 News aired undercover investigative videos showing Nix boasting about using prostitutes, bribery sting operations, and honey traps to discredit politicians on whom it conducted opposition research, and saying that the company "ran all of (Donald Trump's) digital campaign". In response to the media reports, the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) of the UK pursued a warrant to search the company's servers. Facebook banned Cambridge Analytica from advertising on its platform, saying that it had been deceived. On 23 March 2018, the British High Court granted the ICO a warrant to search Cambridge Analytica's London offices.
The personal data of up to 87 million Facebook users were acquired via the 270,000 Facebook users who used a Facebook app called "This Is Your Digital Life." By giving this third-party app permission to acquire their data, back in 2015, this also gave the app access to information on the user's friends network; this resulted in the data of about 87 million users, the majority of whom had not explicitly given Cambridge Analytica permission to access their data, being collected. The app developer breached Facebook's terms of service by giving the data to Cambridge Analytica.
On 1 May 2018, Cambridge Analytica and its parent company filed for insolvency proceedings and closed operations. Alexander Tayler, a former director for Cambridge Analytica, was appointed director of Emerdata on 28 March 2018. Rebekah Mercer, Jennifer Mercer, Alexander Nix and Johnson Chun Shun Ko [zh] who has links to Erik Prince are in leadership positions at Emerdata.
- Fresh Cambridge Analytica leak ‘shows global manipulation is out of control’
Company’s work in 68 countries laid bare with release of more than 100,000 documents
Whistleblower leak
The Guardian reports:
An explosive leak of tens of thousands of documents from the defunct data firm Cambridge Analytica is set to expose the inner workings of the company that collapsed after the Observer revealed it had misappropriated 87 million Facebook profiles.
More than 100,000 documents relating to work in 68 countries that will lay bare the global infrastructure of an operation used to manipulate voters on "an industrial scale" are set to be released over the next months.
It comes as Christopher Steele, the ex-head of MI6’s Russia desk and the intelligence expert behind the so-called "Steele dossier" into Trump’s relationship with Russia, said that while the company had closed down, the failure to properly punish bad actors meant that the prospects for manipulation of the US election this year were even worse.
The release of documents began on New Year’s Day on an anonymous Twitter account, @HindsightFiles, with links to material on elections in Malaysia, Kenya and Brazil. The documents were revealed to have come from Brittany Kaiser, an ex-Cambridge Analytica employee turned whistleblower, and to be the same ones subpoenaed by Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
Kaiser, who starred in the Oscar-shortlisted Netflix documentary The Great Hack, decided to go public after last month’s election in Britain. "It’s so abundantly clear our electoral systems are wide open to abuse," she said. "I’m very fearful about what is going to happen in the US election later this year, and I think one of the few ways of protecting ourselves is to get as much information out there as possible."
In the News
Fiction cross-reference
Nonfiction cross-reference
- Brittany Kaiser (nonfiction) - former Cambridge Analytica employee turned whistleblower
- Christopher Steele (nonfiction) - ex-head of MI6’s Russia desk and the intelligence expert behind the so-called "Steele dossier" into Trump’s relationship with Russia.
- Steele dossier (nonfiction)
External links
- Cambridge Analytica @ Wikipedia