The same data analytics firm that worked with Donald Trump’s election harvested 50 million Facebook profiles of U.S. voters and used them to create a software that predicts and influences who people vote for.
The firm called Cambridge Analytica is the owned by billionaire #RobertMercer, and was formally ran by Trump’s key adviser #SteveBannon. Back in 2014, Mercer and Brannon illegally and without authorization from Facebook, took information from individual U.S. citizen’s Facebook pages and built a program that would target those people with personalized political advertisements.
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“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 the entire company was built on,” said Christopher Wylie, a former Cambridge assistant.
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By 2015, Facebook found out information had been gathered but didn’t notify users, and took minimal action to recover the private information, according to the Observer. Now Facebook CEO has broken his silence and addressed the data leak via a statement he posted to his official Facebook page.
“We have a responsibility to protect your data, and if we can’t then we don’t deserve to serve you. I’ve been working to understand exactly what happened and how to make sure this doesn’t happen again. The good news is that the most important actions to prevent this from happening again today we have already taken years ago. But we also made mistakes, there’s more to do, and we need to step up and do it,” said Zuckerberg.
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It’s been more than two years since Facebook first reported the date breach and since then the social media platform announced it will be suspending Cambridge Analytica and Kogan from the site. However, Zuckerberg now faces several lawsuits from investors angry about the data leak that sent the company’s value to drop $50 million this week.
