Facebook and Cambridge Analytica: What You Need to Know as Fallout Widens (original) (raw)

Technology|Facebook and Cambridge Analytica: What You Need to Know as Fallout Widens

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/19/technology/facebook-cambridge-analytica-explained.html

You have a preview view of this article while we are checking your access. When we have confirmed access, the full article content will load.

March 19, 2018

Cambridge Analytica, a political data firm hired by President Trump’s 2016 election campaign, gained access to information on 50 million Facebook users as a way to identify the personalities of American voters and influence their behavior.Credit...Elise Amendola/Associated Press

Our report that a political firm hired by the Trump campaign acquired access to private data on millions of Facebook users has sparked new questions about how the social media giant protects user information.

Who collected all that data?

Cambridge Analytica, a political data firm hired by President Trump’s 2016 election campaign, gained access to private information on more than 50 million Facebook users. The firm offered tools that could identify the personalities of American voters and influence their behavior.

Cambridge has been largely funded by Robert Mercer, the wealthy Republican donor, and Stephen K. Bannon, a former adviser to the president who became an early board member and gave the firm its name. It has pitched its services to potential clients ranging from Mastercard and the New York Yankees to the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

On Monday, a British TV news report cast it in a harsher light, showing video of Cambridge Analytica executives offering to entrap politicians. A day later, as a furor grew, the company suspended its chief executive, Alexander Nix.

_[Read more about how_ Cambridge Analytica and the Trump campaign became linked]

What kind of information was collected, and how was it acquired?

The data, a portion of which was viewed by The New York Times, included details on users’ identities, friend networks and “likes.” The idea was to map personality traits based on what people had liked on Facebook, and then use that information to target audiences with digital ads.

Researchers in 2014 asked users to take a personality survey and download an app, which scraped some private information from their profiles and those of their friends, activity that Facebook permitted at the time and has since banned.

The technique had been developed at Cambridge University’s Psychometrics Center. The center declined to work with Cambridge Analytica, but Aleksandr Kogan, a Russian-American psychology professor at the university, was willing.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

Already a subscriber? Log in.

Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT