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Cambridge Analytica had used a massive database of personal information on voters to help influence the outcome — paid for by the Trump and Leave.EU campaigns.
And they had harvested this data by releasing a seemingly harmless Facebook quiz which siphoned off all your personal info as soon as you started taking the quiz — and allowed access to all your friends’ data as well.
That invasion of privacy is startling enough, but the way Cambridge Analytica went on to use that vast cache of information is the stuff of were most susceptible to being swayed towards voting a certain way.
They created targeted advertising campaigns, memes, all manner of content with the express purpose of psychologically manipulating people’s perceptions and intentions.
Not only did it work, but they had done the same thing numerous times in countries all around the world.
The Great Hack picks up the story through the eyes of American academic David Carroll, as he discusses the ways our personal information see exactly what kind of information it has collated on him — and how much.
Meanwhile, we meet Brittany Kaiser, a former senior executive at Cambridge Analytica, who worked on the Leave.EU campaign and who drew up the contract for the Trump campaign.
Kaiser initially appears as this morally bankrupt, vapid cipher of a human. But as the story progresses and we learn more about her background, her family situation and her personal ethics, her true persona slowly shifts into focus, as do her reasons for blowing use of social media as an organisational and information-spreading tool.
But while that story was one of new technology being used to empower the people, The Great Hack looks at the flipside, the way that same technology is increasingly being used by governments and private corporations to subvert our interests rather than to serve them.
In a sense, what Cambridge Analytica was doing isn’t so different from any other kind of advertising or political campaigning, which always involves a level of railroad the democratic process of entire countries.
A strong feature of the documentary is an innovative animation that overlays reallife footage in a way designed to show us the world the way the internet sees us.
Little shreds of data being scraped off with each swipe of a credit card or each tap of the “like” button on Facebook, a constant trickle of tiny particles of information sprinkling away from us with every interaction, which swirls upwards, merging with millions of other small trickles to become a torrent of data, capable of creating have a basic awareness of the scandal, you might have to work a bit harder to keep the timeline straight. Data-mining and trading is a difficult issue for us to confront, because we knowingly surrender our own privacy in myriad ways every day and generally try not to think too much about who might be benefiting from it.
But The Great Hack will certainly frighten you into thinking a bit harder about your data rights. And we really should be frightened.
The Great Hack (M) is now streaming on Netflix.