On Tuesday, the Federal Trade Commission launched an investigation into how voter-profiling company #CambridgeAnalytica accessed date from about 50 million #Facebook users. Just yesterday, #Facebook CEO #MarkZuckerberg sat down with CNN where he addressed the privacy scandal that his company is embroiled in, but first let me tell you guys how all of this started!
In a nutshell, this scandal began brewing back in 2014 when app developer Aleksandr Kogan developed a personality-quiz app for Facebook. That influenced the Psychometrics Centre, a Cambridge University laboratory that Kogan was employed by, to create a similar quiz. After about 270,000 people downloaded the app, whatever personal info it asked them for, was saved into a database instead of deleting it.
Kogan handed that data over to Cambridge Analytica where it was used to make 30 million “psychographic” profiles about voters. “Cambridge Analytica also used its “psychographic” tools to make targeted online ad buys for the Brexit “Leave” campaign, the 2016 presidential campaign of Ted Cruz, and the 2016 Trump campaign. If any British Cambridge Analytica employees without a green card worked on those two U.S. campaigns, they did so in violation of federal law,” @TheAtlantic reports.
Now, this company has ties to #DonaldTrump which is has raised eyebrows. “Rebekah Mercer, a Republican donor and a co-owner of Breitbart News, sits on the board of Cambridge Analytica,” @TheAtlantic reports. “Her father, Robert Mercer, invested $15 million in Cambridge Analytica on the recommendation of his political adviser, Steve Bannon, according to the @NYTimes.”
…but wait, there’s more! Hidden camera footage surfaced on Monday showing Cambridge Analytica’s CEO, Alexander Nix, offering bribes and threatening blackmail to several public officials around the world. If he did this it would violate U.K. law, but he’s been suspended anyway.
During his interview with CNN, Zuckerberg apologized for the company’s “breach of trust,” saying, “This was a major breach of trust, and I’m really sorry this happened.” He added, “Our responsibility now is to make sure this doesn’t happen again.”
He also made a Facebook post addressing the scandal.
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Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/03/the-cambridge-analytica-scandal-in-three-paragraphs/556046/
