Facebook is facing major fallout after reports that Cambridge Analytica, a data analytics firm that worked on Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, obtained data from roughly 50 million Facebook profiles and used it to build voter targeting tools.
According to The Observer and The New York Times, the data was gathered in 2014 through a personality quiz app built by a researcher named Aleksandr Kogan, which then passed the information to the firm without Facebook’s permission. Reports say billionaire Robert Mercer funded the firm and that Steve Bannon, later a top Trump adviser, was a vice president on its board. Cambridge Analytica has denied wrongdoing.
“We exploited Facebook to harvest millions of people’s profiles,” said Christopher Wylie, a former Cambridge Analytica employee who spoke to The Observer. Reports say Facebook learned of the data collection in 2015 but did not tell users, and that it relied on the firm’s promise that the data had been deleted.
On Wednesday, March 21, 2018, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg addressed the issue in a post on his Facebook page. “We have a responsibility to protect your data, and if we can’t then we don’t deserve to serve you,” he wrote, adding that the company made mistakes and has more to do. Facebook has also suspended Cambridge Analytica and Kogan from the platform.
The company’s stock price fell sharply during the week, wiping out tens of billions of dollars in market value, and investors have filed lawsuits over the drop.
