Facebook's Cambridge Analytica Data Scandal Explained

Christopher Wylie, a former director at Cambridge Analytica (a data analytical company founded by Alexander Nix) came forward as a whistle blower and revealed that they had illegally used the data of nearly 50 million Facebook users to create microtargeted ads and influence the voters during the US elections where Donald Trump, a person of extreme ideas became the president. What happened afterwards was a disaster for Facebook. It lost more than $5 billion in the stock markets. An online movement asking people to #deleteFacebook was started by Facebook owned WhatsApp founder Brian Acton. Mark Zuckerberg gave a public apology on the CNN interview and he also published full page ads in Britain and US newspapers apologizing to the people. Above all it gave a chance again for people to doubt it’s capability to protect users’ data. But how did all this happen….?

In 2013 Alexander Nix started Cambridge Analytica, an offshoot of the SCL group to target voters in political campaign by serving personalised ads. He convinced Steve Bannon, an American media executive about the possibilities of using this idea for the US presidential elections. Steve Bannon was a staunch supporter of Donald Trump and thus he helped Cambridge Analytica get a funding of more than $15 million from Robert Mercer, who was one of the prominent donors for the election campaigns of Donald Trump.

So now Cambridge Analytica needed data. Because the company itself had no importance without data. A person by name Alexander Kogan offered to sell it to them. So Alexander Kogan, a Russian American researcher at the Cambridge university had built an app called THIS IS YOUR DIGITAL LIFE and it was downloaded for around 27000 times. Back then the Facebook API allowed developers like Kogan access to not only the users data but also to the data of all the friends of the user. So in this manner he had gained access to more than 50 million Facebook users data and this he sold to the Cambridge Analytica. Even in 2015 Facebook had received information that Cambridge Analytica had this data with them. It then asked them to delete all the data and give a written document stating that they no longer had any of that data which Nix did but the Facebook’s team failed to check its authenticity.

So Cambridge Analytica used this data and developed psychographic profiles of all the users and fed them with the propaganda news so that their perception about certain issues changed. But experts say it’s very difficult to determine whether the work done by Cambridge Analytica actually helped Donald Trump win the Presidential elections. But Facebook came back into the limelight again for bad reasons when Christopher Wylie, the whistle blower came forward and revealed everything in an interview to The Guardian.

Though Facebook has made stricter guidelines for the developers now but this comes at a time when Facebook is losing its popularity over several issues. Few months ago a former executive at Facebook Mr Chamat Palinapitiya stated that he regretted creating Facebook and that its destroying the social fabric of the society. Then there are data security issues too where Facebook has to take notable steps to gain back people’s trust. So that’s it. But don’t you think it was ethically wrong on the Cambridge Analytica’s side as way back in 2015 they had given statements that they had deleted all the data which Facebook believed but actually they didn’t delete it. So let me know your views in the comments section below.