Mar 21, 2018 8:59 PM

The Cambridge Analytica Story, Explained

A quick, but thorough, overview of the controversy.

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01
What is Cambridge Analytica, anyway?
It's a political data-analysis firm that worked on the 2016 Trump campaign. CA’s professed advantage is having enough data points on every American to build extensive personality profiles, which its clients can leverage for “psychographic targeting” of ads.
02
What’s the problem?
At issue is how Cambridge Analytica got a hold of such a massive dataset of the American electorate. The firm is being accused of using and secretly keeping data on 50 million Facebook users without their permission.

03
How did they do that?
That data was acquired via “thisisyourdigitallife,” a third-party app created by a researcher at Cambridge University’s Psychometrics Centre. Nearly 300,000 people downloaded it, thereby handing the researcher—and Cambridge Analytica—access to not just their own data, and their friends' as well. (Friendly reminder: *always* read the permissions requests for third-party apps.)
04
What’s the Trump connection?
The Trump 2016 digital campaign relied heavily on ad targeting, which may have utilized Cambridge Analytica’s (possibly illegally obtained) Facebook data.

05
What about this undercover video people are talking about?
In an investigation that just began airing this week, Britain’s Channel 4 caught Cambridge Analytica executives appearing to say they could extort politicians (by sending women to entrap them) and spread propaganda to help their clients. They also seemed to admit preying on the public's fears.
06
What's the Fallout Been?
Well, Cambridge Analytica has suspended its CEO, Alexander Nix. And just today, Mark Zuckerberg published a long Facebook post outlining Facebook's responsibility in the matter and mapping out the steps forward. But the full extent of the wrongdoing—where culpability lies, and who knew what when—is still emerging.

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