Cambridge Analytica spotlights how politics works in digital world
Company’s demise won’t yield change
The Washington Post
The demise of Cambridge Analytica last week may bring a fleeting sense of relief to those worried about personal data being used to shape how they vote, or even the outcome of entire elections.
But the larger lesson of the scandal that brought down one of President Donald Trump’s campaign vendors is that politics and data are now inextricably linked — with or without Cambridge Analytica in the picture.
Cambridge Analytica, as it made clear in its farewell news release on Wednesday, was part of a much broader development in politics — a world increasingly fueled by vast troves of personal data that billions of Internet users emit every day.
The company said it was being unfairly singled out for for doing things that are “widely accepted as a standard component of online advertising in both the political and commercial arenas.”
In a world with few laws governing how data is used, some of the ashes of Cambridge Analytica already are being resurrected in a new firm, with some of the same key people, in a British company, Emerdata.
Even without Cambridge Analytica or Emerdata, politicians now have the tools to target people individually — based on data suggesting their race, religion, income, shopping habits, sexual orientation, medical concerns, personality traits, current location, past locations, pet preference or Zodiac sign if they’d like. The implosion of Cambridge Analytica has made clear how politics often works in their increasingly digital world.
The trove of documents shared publicly by the company’s former research director, Christopher Wylie, illustrates that granular personal data on each person can be used to create precise messages to any individual voter, then delivered to him or her through the online ecosystem over Facebook, Instagram, Google, Twitter and other free services. Such tactics have long been standard in commerce — ever noticed how ads for those nice hiking boots keep following you around the Web? — but all these tactics of manipulation are equally available to those working in largely unregulated political realms, too.
Politicians hired Cambridge Analyica to use this technology to shape events in many countries across the world. That includes places, like Kenya and Nigeria, where democracy is new and fragile, and places like Britain and the United States, where there is less of an expectation of voter manipulation.
Though there has long been skepticism about whether Cambridge Analytica was as effective as it claimed, experts expect this technology to only improve, especially as artificial intelligence and virtual reality steadily grow more powerful. The era of campaign season “deep fakes” — imagine a convincing but phony clip of a politician doing something appalling — is not far off.
Even as Cambridge Analytica announced bankruptcy, regulators around the world pledged they would continue investigating the company. In the United Kingdom, the country’s top data protection authority, the Information Commissioner’s Office, said in a statement it would “pursue individuals and directors, as appropriate and necessary even where companies may no longer be operating.”
Yet longtime watchers of these issues take little comfort in Cambridge Analytica’s decision to declare bankruptcy. Jonathan Albright, a social media analyst who has been studying the company for nearly two years, saw it as little more than a legal maneuver.
“Cambridge Analytica’s business entity — an unincorporated LLC — is the natural target of lawsuits. Dissolving the company greatly reduces the legal and financial liabilities associated with its data mishandling practices in the future,” said Mr. Albright, research director a Columbia’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism.
And critics of Cambridge Analytica and the largely unregulated use of personal data for political campaigns said the closing of the company will have little effect on the kinds of abuses that the company is alleged to have committed.
“The closing of Cambridge Analytica doesn’t stop the problem that voters and consumers face in terms of a growing loss of privacy and a gross misuse of their data,” said Jeff Chester of the Center for Digital Democracy. “Cambridge Analytica’s practices, although it crossed ethical boundaries, is really emblematic of how data driven digital marketing occurs worldwide. Americans are currently helpless to stop the massive flows of their personal information now regularly fed to Google, Facebook, ISPs and many others.”
Yet it’s not even clear that the people who created Cambridge Analytica are leaving this field. As freelance journalist Wendy Siegelman and Business Insider reported last month, two members of the Mercer family — major backers of conservative political causes whose money and management was key to Cambridge Analytica from the beginning — have joined the board of Emerdata.
According to British public filings, Emerdata was incorporated in August 2017 and Rebekah Mercer and her sister were appointed to its board on March 20 of this year, days after news broke of the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
The filings show that suspended Cambridge Analytica CEO, Alexander Nix, briefly served on the board of Emerdata, alongside Johnson Ko, a partner of Trump ally Erik Prince.
Cambridge Analytica is vanishing from view, but the increasingly common political art it practiced is not.