50m Facebook profiles harvested for Cambridge Analytica in major data breach

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Richard Forno <rforno () infowarrior org>
> Date: March 17, 2018 at 12:42:37 PM EDT
> To: Infowarrior List <infowarrior () attrition org>
> Cc: Dave Farber <dave () farber net>
> Subject: 50m Facebook profiles harvested for Cambridge Analytica in major data breach
>
> Revealed: 50 million Facebook profiles harvested for Cambridge Analytica in major data breach
>
> Whistleblower describes how firm linked to former Trump adviser Steve Bannon compiled user data to target American 
> voters 
>
> Carole Cadwalladr and Emma Graham-Harrison
>
> Sat 17 Mar 2018 09.18 EDT First published on Sat 17 Mar 2018 09.01 EDT
>
> The data analytics firm that worked with Donald Trump’s election team and the winning Brexit campaign harvested 
> millions of Facebook profiles of US voters, in the tech giant’s 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 Trump’s 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 people’s 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.
>
> The data was collected through an app called thisisyourdigitallife, built by academic Aleksandr Kogan, separately 
> from his work at Cambridge University. Through his company Global Science Research (GSR), in collaboration with 
> Cambridge Analytica, hundreds of thousands of users were paid to take a personality test and agreed to have their 
> data collected for academic use.
>
> However, the app also collected the information of the test-takers’ Facebook friends, leading to the accumulation of 
> a data pool tens of millions-strong. Facebook’s “platform policy” allowed only collection of friends data to improve 
> user experience in the app and barred it being sold on or used for advertising.
>
> The discovery of the unprecedented data harvesting, and the use to which it was put, raises urgent new questions 
> about Facebook’s role in targeting voters in the US presidential election.
>
> <  - >
>
> https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/17/cambridge-analytica-facebook-influence-us-election



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