Facebook, Donald Trump, and Cambridge Analytica Tied Together in Security Breach

This past weekend, The Guardian published an article that featured whistleblower Christopher Wylie; he spoke on how his former data analytics firm, Cambridge Analytica, took advantage of security flaws in Facebook’s data access to harvest information from over 50 million profiles. 50 million may seem like a lot of profiles, but it is a miniscule number in comparison to the 2.2 billion active users the social media titan reported back in the fourth quarter of 2017.

The data analytics firm in question, Cambridge Analytica, is noteworthy due to its association not only with the sitting president, Donald Trump and his controversial campaign, but also with another controversial and successful conservative notion in Britain’s Brexit movement.

The firm also raises some eyebrows due to its connections with Steve Bannon, former chief strategist of the Trump administration from January to August of 2017, and until recently, executive chairman of alt-right news site Breitbart. Another important name associated with the data firm is Robert Mercer, a wealthy republican donor who helped and funded Cambridge Analytica.

One of the most notable aspects of Donald Trump’s success in winning the presidency was the “viral” aspect to his campaign with his slogans and catchphrases that were nearly unavoidable no matter what corner of the internet someone was on. It’s now known this was by design.

The whole situation began in 2014 when Facebook gave Cambridge University’s professor Dr. Aleksandr Kogan access to information to those who downloaded his app that featured a personality quiz with Cambridge Analytica paying individuals for taking the quiz.

The app required two things: the user to be a registered voter in the United States, and for the user to have a Facebook account. Once the user took the quiz, the data was paired with the user’s Facebook data to form an algorithm later used to target and possibly influence their votes in the elections a mere two years later.

While Facebook allowed Kogan to harvest data, they only allowed it for academic use, and it wasn’t meant to be used in a commercial sense.

Facebook also allowed for the collection of friends of the user although this data, along with all other data Kogan was allowed to collect, was explicitly banned from being used in anything other than the academic use the Cambridge lecturer claimed it would be used for.

This data would later be crucial in Cambridge Analytica’s political marketing for Donald Trump’s Presidential campaign. In March 2018, a year and five months after the Trump’s successful presidential campaign, Christopher Wylie came clean on the influence the data firm had on the success of said campaign. Wylie revealed not only how the data was collected and used, but also just how early Facebook learned about the amount of information collected.

In late 2015, Facebook discovered just how much information Kogan and his company had collected, and did not inform users of the scale and took very limited actions to recover the data.  While the extent to which this influenced the 2016 presidential election is unknown, it is clear that at the very least the Trump campaign paid good money to the firm for the influence with almost $3 million being sent their way in the final months of the campaign.

The fallout of this has been less than pretty for all involved with Cambridge Analytica; it is now firmly in the crosshairs of Robert Mueller’s investigation into Trump’s campaign. On the other side, Facebook’s stock has plummeted after the news broke (although as of now, it is unknown if Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s social media empire will suffer in the long run).

This is very much still a developing story with some of the potential fallout having huge ramifications for the president and those involved.