Cambridge Analytica
More info
- Released
- 2013–2018
- Owner
- SCL Group
- Type
- Political data analytics
The political analytics firm whose Facebook data became the defining privacy scandal of the 2010s.
A subsidiary of Britain's SCL Group, set up in 2013 with Robert Mercer's money and Steve Bannon on the board. The data came from researcher Aleksandr Kogan's quiz app "thisisyourdigitallife": about 270,000 people took it, but Facebook's API at the time let the app pull their friends' profiles too. All told, up to 87 million accounts were swept up through the social graph rather than by consent.
Whistleblower Christopher Wylie went public in The Observer and the New York Times in March 2018, and the firm shut down that May. How well its psychological profiling actually worked is disputed; the consequences for Facebook are not — a $5 billion FTC fine in 2019, and a textbook example in every GDPR training course since.