In the latest revelation, Facebook announced on March 18 that University of Cambridge psychology lecturer and St Petersburg university professor Dr Aleksandr Kogan "lied to us and violated our Platform Policies by passing data from an app that was using Facebook Login to SCL/Cambridge Analytica, a firm that does political, government, and military work around the globe".
According to former Cambridge Analytica's parent company SCL employee Christopher Wylie, Kogan provided data on over 50 million Facebook profiles for Cambridge Analytica. Ironically, Wylie, who had nothing in common with his right-wing bosses -- hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer and Trump's key adviser Steve Bannon -- was the one who came up with the programming, which enabled Trump's backers to use "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."
It was never just the answers people gave to the quiz. The real crown jewel was the open access it gave Cambridge Analytica to their Facebook accounts. According to Wylie, hundreds of thousands of Facebook users took personality tests with the app. In doing so, users consented to their data being collected for academic use. Its use was to prove anything but academic. In partnership with Kogan's company Global Science Research (GSR), they did that by creating the app, "thisisyourdigitallife". This purported to be a personality quiz that was billed as "a research app used by psychologists". It was used to spread individually targeted political propaganda. This seemingly harmless quiz helped gathered, according to Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix, "nearly 5 thousand different data points about you to craft and target a message".
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Credits:
http://www.zdnet.com/article/how-cambridge-analytica-used-your-facebook-data-to-help-elect-trump/
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