It’s possible that despite capturing Facebook data on 50 million people, Cambridge Analytica didn’t actually accomplish anything noteworthy in the realm of politics. At the center of the company’s claim to significance is a technique for turning people’s Facebook “likes” into psychological profiles, and a further claim that these profiles rendered victims vulnerable to manipulation.But scientific papers used to back those claims leave doubt as to whether the company’s technique was likely to work as advertised.QuickTake How the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica Saga UnfoldedIt sounds chilling. Quoted in The Guardian, ex-employee Christopher Wyle called the company's technique “psychological warfare.” The idea, as Wyle described it, was to target people with political ads “designed to work on their particular psychological makeup.”On a British television expose, company officials boasted that their … [Read more...] about Cambridge Analytica’s Real Feat Was Selling Itself
Cambridge analytica
Peter Thiel’s Palantir Says Rogue Employee Engaged With Cambridge Analytica
Palantir Technologies Inc., the closely held data-mining startup founded by billionaire Peter Thiel, said it never engaged with political analysis firm Cambridge Analytica but discovered one of its employees had.Cambridge Analytica is the U.K. firm that harvested data from 50 million unwitting Facebook Inc. users to target voters and help elect Donald Trump. That sparked a firestorm around the social networking firm’s failure to protect personal data and raised larger questions about who owns user information. More details have emerged since that initial revelation, with former Cambridge Analytica employee-turned-whistleblower Chris Wylie testifying Tuesday to U.K. lawmakers that Palantir helped Cambridge Analytica by building algorithms using the Facebook data.Palantir disputed Wylie’s claims and said although Cambridge Analytica sought to engage on “multiple” occasions, Palantir always shot down the offer. One … [Read more...] about Peter Thiel’s Palantir Says Rogue Employee Engaged With Cambridge Analytica
Cambridge Analytica whistle-blower questions the legitimacy of the Brexit vote
Mark Zuckerberg will not testify to a UK parliamentary committee regarding users’ data being exploited by the Cambridge Analytica consultancy, Facebook announced on Tuesday. Addressing the same committee on Tuesday, Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Christopher Wylie expressed the certainty that without the consultancy’s intervention the EU membership referendum would have a very different outcome. Wylie said the Leave campaign “cheated.” Leaks undermining the legitimacy of the Leave campaign began last week when another whistleblower, Shamir Sanni, provided evidence of illicit funding to the tune of €711,000. Specifically, the Leave campaign used a proxy campaign – BeLeave – to pay the Canadian data-analytics company AggregateIQ (AIQ) for online campaigning services. Sanni’s documents seem to establish that BeLeave was run from the former offices of the Leave campaign; moreover, the two campaigns coordinated spending. On the top of the … [Read more...] about Cambridge Analytica whistle-blower questions the legitimacy of the Brexit vote
Cambridge Analytica Saga Ensnares a Tiny Canadian Data Shop
A tiny data analytics firm in a quiet provincial capital in Canada’s far west has found itself at the center of the scandal surrounding Cambridge Analytica’s role in U.K. and U.S. elections.AggregateIQ, based in Victoria, British Columbia, is alleged by former Cambridge Analytica employee-turned-whistleblower Christopher Wylie to be the technology behind Cambridge Analytica’s work in using social media data to help win elections. AggregateIQ firmly denies it’s owned or directed by Cambridge Analytica.AggregateIQ is a small data analytics firm with about a dozen employees listed on LinkedIn. It was founded by two western Canadian political staffers, Jeff Silvester and Zackary Massingham. Silvester worked for a federal member of parliament from the Victoria area, while Massingham campaigned for Mike de Jong, a former provincial minister who earlier this year was running to lead British Columbia’s opposition Liberal party.According to Wylie, who has spoken … [Read more...] about Cambridge Analytica Saga Ensnares a Tiny Canadian Data Shop
Would Brexit have come about without Cambridge Analytica?
Christopher Wylie, a former employee of Cambridge Analytica, said the British would not have voted for Brexit in such large numbers without the coordinated action of far-right networks that lent a hand to the Leave.eu campaign. EURACTIV.fr reports. For the British whistleblower there is no doubt about it: without the mass intervention on social media by Cambridge Analytica, Brexit would not have happened. In an interview with several European media outlets, including French daily Libération, the 28-year-old revealed how Cambridge Analytica had exploited the data of 50 million people on Facebook and provided details of how the company had an impact on several elections and referendums. “The fact that a society has created a huge database of citizens, some of them collected illegally, and that there was interaction with military clients and defence ministries in several countries, poses a serious risk and erases the line between surveillance and market … [Read more...] about Would Brexit have come about without Cambridge Analytica?