Data analysis group associated with Trump campaign harvested information from millions of Facebook accounts in order to target them more effectively.

Courtesy of The Guardian:  

The data analytics firm that worked with Donald Trump’s election team and the winning Brexit campaign harvested millions of Facebook profiles of US voters, in the tech giant’s biggest ever data breach, and used them to build a powerful software program to predict and influence choices at the ballot box. 

A whistleblower has revealed to the Observer how Cambridge Analytica – a company owned by the hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, and headed at the time by Trump’s key adviser Steve Bannon – used personal information taken without authorisation in early 2014 to build a system that could profile individual US voters, in order to target them with personalised political advertisements. 

Christopher Wylie, who worked with an academic at Cambridge University to obtain the data, told the Observer: “We exploited Facebook to harvest millions of people’s profiles. And built models to exploit what we knew about them and target their inner demons. That was the basis that the entire company was built on.” 

Documents seen by the Observer, and confirmed by a Facebook statement, show that by late 2015 the company had found out that information had been harvested on an unprecedented scale. However, at the time it failed to alert users and took only limited steps to recover and secure the private information of more than 50 million individuals. 

The New York Times is reporting that copies of the data harvested for Cambridge Analytica could still be found online; its reporting team had viewed some of the raw data.

Couple of things to note here.

First off Jared Kushner took credit for bringing Cambridge Analytica into the Trump campaign:  

“I called somebody who works for one of the technology companies that I work with, and I had them give me a tutorial on how to use Facebook micro-targeting,” Kushner told Steven Bertoni of Forbes. “We brought in Cambridge Analytica. I called some of my friends from Silicon Valley who were some of the best digital marketers in the world. And I asked them how to scale this stuff . . . We basically had to build a $400 million operation with 1,500 people operating in 50 states, in five months to then be taken apart. We started really from scratch.”

Secondly if this breach happened way back in 2014, it might indicate that Trump was already getting his ducks in a row to run way back then, despite his claims that he did not decide until 2015. 

Thirdly using Facebook data was also how the Russians targeted users for their propaganda campaign, which could link their efforts directly to Kushner and the Trump campaign, something I am certain Robert Mueller is already looking into.

Have you noticed that the more we learn, the more it seems to indicate that the Russians and the Trump campaign worked hand in hand to win that 2016 election?

P.S. The Massachusetts Attorney General is now launching in investigation into Cambridge Analytica.