Facebook and Cambridge Analytica are back in the news. Seems Cambridge Analytica (CA) was data slurping user profiles to hep them build a platform for targeting propoganda. In this case, CA slurped details of American voters. Quite crafty actually. They paid 160,000 FB users to take a personality quiz – that allowed them access to all their friends, 50mn of them. Armed with this data, CA were good to go to create algorithms to target people with ‘fake news’. Not just to target these 50mn users of course but EVERYONE. This knowledge was/is applied to other campaigns CA is involved with as well. Right now the focus is Trump, Russians and Brexit.
This is a prime example of why GDPR is so important and such a great law. FB should never have been able to allow CA access to our data and CA should never been allowed to have it. For the full story click here to read more.