Facebook data exploited for Trump
Christopher Wylie helped found the data firm Cambridge Analytica and worked there until 2014. Consulting firm harvested profiles of 50 million users without their permission
LONDON— As the upstart voter-profiling company Cambridge Analytica prepared to wade into the 2014 U.S. midterm elections, it had a problem.
The firm had secured a $15-million (U.S.) investment from Robert Mercer, the wealthy Republican donor, and wooed his political adviser, Stephen K. Bannon, with the promise of tools that could identify the personalities of U.S. voters and influence their behaviour. But it did not have the data to make its new products work.
So the firm harvested private information from the Facebook profiles of more than 50 million users without their permission, according to former Cambridge employees, associates and documents, making it one of the largest data leaks in the social network’s history. The breach allowed the company to exploit the private social-media activity of a huge swath of the U.S. electorate, developing techniques that underpinned its work on U.S. President Donald Trump’s campaign in 2016.
An examination by the New York Times and the Observer of London reveals how Cambridge Analytica’s drive to bring to market a potentially powerful new weapon put the firm — and wealthy conservative investors seeking to reshape politics — under scrutiny from investigators and lawmakers on both sides of the Atlantic.
Christopher Wylie, who helped found Cambridge and worked there until late 2014, said of its leaders: “Rules don’t matter for them. For them, this is a war, and it’s all fair.
“They want to fight a culture war in America. Cambridge Analytica was supposed to be the arsenal of weapons to fight that culture war.”
Details of Cambridge’s acquisition and use of Facebook data have surfaced in several accounts since the business began working on the 2016 campaign, setting off a furious debate about the merits of the firm’s psychographic modelling techniques.
But the full scale of the data leak involving Americans has not been previously disclosed — and Facebook, until now, has not acknowledged it. Interviews with half a dozen former employees and contractors, and a review of the firm’s emails and documents, have revealed that Cambridge not only relied on the private Facebook data but also still possesses most or all of the trove.
Cambridge paid to acquire the personal information through an out- side researcher who, Facebook says, claimed to be collecting it for academic purposes.
During a week of inquiries from the Times, Facebook downplayed the scope of the leak and questioned whether any of the data still remained out of its control. But Friday, the company posted a statement expressing alarm and promising to take action.
“This was a scam — and a fraud,” Paul Grewal, a vice president and deputy general counsel at the social network, said in a statement to the Times earlier Friday. He added that the company was suspending Cambridge Analytica, Wylie and the researcher, Aleksandr Kogan, a Russian-American academic, from Facebook. “We will take whatever steps are required to see that the data in question is deleted once and for all — and take action against all offending parties,” Grewal said.
Alexander Nix, the chief executive of Cambridge Analytica, and other officials had repeatedly denied obtaining or using Facebook data, most recently during a parliamentary hearing last month. But in a statement to the Times, the company acknowledged that it had acquired the data, though it blamed Kogan for violating Facebook’s rules and said it had deleted the information as soon as it learned of the problem two years ago.
In Britain, Cambridge Analytica is facing intertwined investigations by Parliament and government regulators, who are scrutinizing possible data privacy violations and allegations that it performed illegal work on the Brexit campaign. In the United States, Congressional investigators have questioned Nix about the company’s role in the Trump campaign. And the Justice Department’s special counsel, Robert Mueller, has demanded the emails of Cambridge Analytica employees who worked for the Trump team as part of his investigation into Russian interference in the election.
In late 2013, Nix, a brash salesman, led the small elections division at SCL Group, a political and defence contractor. He had spent much of the year trying to break into the lucrative new world of political data, recruiting Wylie, then a 24-year-old political operative interested in using inherent psychological traits to affect voters’ behaviour. Wylie had assembled a team of psychologists and data scientists, some of them affiliated with Cambridge University.
Nix and his colleagues courted Mercer, who believed a sophisticated data company could make him a kingmaker in Republican politics, and his daughter, who shared his conservative views. Bannon was intrigued by the possibility of using personality profiling to shift America’s culture and rewire its politics, Wylie recalled. Through a spokeswoman, Bannon declined to comment.
Building psychographic profiles on a national scale required data the company could not gather without huge expense.
But those kinds of records were useless for figuring out whether a particular voter was, say, a neurotic introvert, a religious extrovert, a fairminded liberal or a fan of the occult. Those were among the psychological traits the firm claimed would provide a uniquely powerful means of designing political messages.
Wylie found a solution at Cambridge University’s Psychometrics Centre. Researchers there had developed a technique to map personality traits based on what people had liked on Facebook. The researchers paid users small sums to take a personality quiz and download an app, which would scrape some private information from their profiles and those of their friends, activity that Facebook permitted at the time.
When the centre declined to work with the firm, Wylie found someone who would: Kogan, a psychology professor at the university.
He built his own app and in June 2014 began harvesting data for Cambridge Analytica. All he divulged to Facebook, and to users in fine print, was that he was collecting information for academic purposes, the social network said.
He provided more than 50 million raw profiles to the firm, Wylie said. Roughly 30 million contained enough information, including places of residence, that the company could match users to other records and build psychographic profiles.
Just as Kogan’s efforts were getting underway, Mercer agreed to invest $15 million in a joint venture with SCL’s elections division. The partners formed a new U.S. company, owned almost entirely by Mercer, with a licence to the psychographics platform developed by Wylie’s team, according to company documents. Bannon, who became a board member, chose the name: Cambridge Analytica.