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The Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal was a major scandal in early 2018 where Cambridge Analytica harvested the personal data of millions of people's Facebook profiles without their consent and used it for political advertising. It has been described as a watershed moment in the public understanding of personal data and precipitated a huge fall in Facebook's stock price and calls for tighter regulation of tech companies' use of personal data.

The illicit harvesting of personal data by Cambridge Analytica was first reported in December 2015 by Harry Davies, a journalist for The Guardian. He reported that Cambridge Analytica was working for United States Senator Ted Cruz using data harvested from millions of people's Facebook accounts without their consent. Facebook refused to comment on the story other than to say it was investigating. Further reports followed in the Swiss publication Das Magazin by Hannes Grasseger and Mikael Krogerus (December 2016), (later translated and published by Vice), Carole Cadwalladr in The Guardian (starting in February 2017) and Mattathias Schwartz in The Intercept (March 2017). Facebook refused to comment on the claims in any of the articles.

The scandal finally erupted in March 2018 with the emergence of a whistle-blower, an ex-Cambridge Analytica employee Christopher Wylie. He had been an anonymous source for an article in 2017 in The Observer by Cadwalladr, headlined "The Great British Brexit Robbery". This article went viral but was disbelieved in some quarters, prompting skeptical responses in The New York Times among others. Cadwalladr worked with Wylie for a year to coax him to come forward as a whistleblower. She later brought in Channel 4 News in the UK and The New York Times due to legal threats against The Guardian and The Observer by Cambridge Analytica.

The three news organisations published simultaneously on March 17, 2018, and caused a huge public outcry. More than $100 billion was knocked off Facebook's market capitalization in days and politicians in the US and UK demanded answers from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. The scandal eventually led to him agreeing to testify in front of the United States Congress.

Overview
A data scientist at Cambridge University, Aleksandr Kogan, was hired by Cambridge Analytica, to develop an app called "This Is Your Digital Life" (sometimes stylised as "thisisyourdigitallife"). He provided the app to Cambridge Analytica, and Cambridge Analytica in turn arranged an informed consent process for research in which several hundred thousand Facebook users would agree to complete a survey for payment that was only for academic use. However, Facebook allowed this app not only to collect personal information from survey respondents but also from respondents’ Facebook friends. In this way Cambridge Analytica acquired data from millions of Facebook users.

Numbers
Wired, The New York Times, and The Observer reported that the dataset had included information on 50 million Facebook users. While Cambridge Analytica claimed it had only collected 30 million Facebook user profiles, Facebook later confirmed that it actually had data on potentially over 87 million users, with 70.6 million of those people from the United States. Within the United States, Facebook estimated that California was the most affected U.S. state, with 6.7 million impacted users, followed by Texas, with 5.6 million, and Florida, with 4.3 million. Data was collected on 87 million users while only 270,000 people downloaded the app.

Information
Facebook sent a message to those users believed to be affected, saying the information likely included one's "public profile, page likes, birthday and current city". Some of the app's users gave the app permission to access their News Feed, timeline, and messages. The data was detailed enough for Cambridge Analytica to create psychographic profiles of the subjects of the data. The data also included the locations of each person. For a given political campaign, the data was detailed enough to create a profile which suggested what kind of advertisement would be most effective to persuade a particular person in a particular location for some political event.

Use of the data
Political events for which politicians paid Cambridge Analytica to use information from the data breach include the following:


 * Created political “regressive” models of users based on their data for advertisement purposes.
 * Used this data to predict the personality of users and create targeted ads based on their personality and political preferences in order to increase advertisement engagement.
 * This data was used in the 2016 presidential election as a means of promoting certain political agendas to Americans and swaying voters in a certain political direction through “micro-targeted” advertising. This data was most prominently used in Ted Cruz 2016 presidential campaign.
 * Used by “Make America Number 1 Super PAC” to attack Donald Trump’s opponent, Hillary Clinton, in the 2016 election. Using the data sourced from Cambridge Analytica, this organization constructed advertisements that attempted to highlight the corruption of Hillary Clinton as a way of propping up Donald Trump as a better candidate for presidency.

News coverage
In December 2015, The Guardian reported that Cambridge Analytica used the data at the behest of Ted Cruz. According to PolitiFact, Trump paid Cambridge Analytica in September, October, and November for data on Americans and their political preferences. On March 17, 2018, The Observer (The Guardian's sister paper, published online on theguardian.com) and The New York Times broke the story simultaneously. The Observer worked with Christopher Wylie, a former employee of Cambridge Analytica, for more than a year before bringing in The New York Times to report the story in the US. Meghan McCain has drawn an equivalence between the use of data by Cambridge Analytica and Barack Obama's 2012 campaign. This data was not used in an unethical way, however, according to PolitiFact (which identifies as a fact checking organization). The Obama campaign used this data to “have their supporters contact their most persuadable friends” rather than using this data for highly targeted digital ads on websites such as Facebook.

Facebook and other companies
Facebook director Mark Zuckerberg first apologized for the situation with Cambridge Analytica on CNN, calling it an "issue", a "mistake" and a "breach of trust". He explained that he was responding to the Facebook community’s concerns and that the company’s initial focus on data portability had shifted to locking down data; he also reminded the platform’s users of their right of access to personal data. Other Facebook officials argued against calling it a "data breach," arguing those who took the personality quiz originally consented to give away their information. Zuckerberg pledged to make changes and reforms in Facebook policy to prevent similar breaches. On March 25, 2018, Zuckerberg published a personal letter in various newspapers apologizing on behalf of Facebook. In April they decided to implement the EU's General Data Protection Regulation in all areas of operation and not just the EU.

Amazon said that they suspended Cambridge Analytica from using their Amazon Web Services when they learned that their service was collecting personal information. The Italian banking company UniCredit stopped advertising and marketing on Facebook.

On April 25, 2018, Facebook released their first earnings report since the scandal was reported. Revenue fell since the last quarter, but this is usual as it followed the holiday season quote. The quarter revenue was the highest for a first quarter, and the second overall.

Facebook established Social Science One as a response to the event.

Governmental actions
The governments of India and Brazil  demanded that Cambridge Analytica report how anyone used data from the breach in political campaigning, and various regional governments in the United States have lawsuits in their court systems from citizens affected by the data breach.

In early July 2018, the United Kingdom's Information Commissioner's Office announced it intended to fine Facebook £500,000 ($663,000) over the data scandal, this being the maximum fine allowed at the time of the breach, saying Facebook "contravened the law by failing to safeguard people's information".

In March 2019, a court filing by the U.S. Attorney General for the District of Columbia alleged that Facebook knew of Cambridge Analytica's "improper data-gathering practices" months before they were first publicly reported in December 2015.

In July 2019, the Federal Trade Commission voted to approve fining Facebook around $5 billion to finally settle the investigation to the scandal, with a 3-2 vote.

Impact on users
Since April 2018, the first full month since the breaking of the Cambridge Analytica data scandal, the number of likes, posts and shares on the site had decreased by almost 20%, and has decreased ever since, with the aforementioned activity only momentarily increasing during the summer and during the 2018 US midterm elections. Despite this, user growth of the site has increased in the period since the scandal, increasing by 1.8% during the final quarter of 2018.

Eitan Hersh
In 2015, Eitan Hersh published Hacking the Electorate: How Campaigns Perceive Voters, which analyzed the databases used for campaigns between 2008 and 2014. On May 6, 2018, Eitan Hersh, a former professor of political science at Tufts University testified before Congress as an expert on voter targeting.

Hersh claimed that the voter targeting by Cambridge Analytica did not excessively affect the outcome of the 2016 election because the techniques used by Cambridge Analytica were similar to those of presidential campaigns well before 2016. Further, he claimed that the correlation between user “likes” and personality traits were weak and thus the psychological profiling of users were also weak.

Mark Jamison
Mark Jamison, the director and Gunter Professor of the Public Utility Research Center at the University of Florida, testified before Congress on May 6, 2018 as an expert. Jamison reiterated that it was not unusual for presidential campaigns to use data like Facebook’s data to profile voters; Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush also used models to micro-target voters. Jamison criticized Facebook for not being “clear and candid with its users” because the users were not aware of the extent that their data would be used. Jamison finished his testimony by saying that if the federal government were to regulate voter targeting to happen on sites like Facebook, it would harm the users of those sites because it would be too restrictive of those sites and would make things worse for regulators.

Christopher Wylie
On May 16, 2018, Christopher Wylie, who is considered the “whistleblower” on Cambridge Analytica and also served as Cambridge Analytica’s Director of Research in 2013 and 2014, also testified to Congress. He was considered a witness to both British and American authorities, and he claims he decided to whistleblow to “protect democratic institutions from rogue actors and hostile foreign interference, as well as ensure the safety of Americans online.” He claimed that at Cambridge Analytica “anything goes” and that Cambridge Analytica was “a corrupting force in the world.” He detailed to Congress how Cambridge Analytica used Facebook’s data to categorize people into groups based on political ideology. He also claimed that Eitan Hersh contradicted “copious amounts of peer-reviewed literature in top scientific journals, including the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, Psychological Science, and Journal of Personality and Individual Differences” by saying that Facebook’s categorizing of people were weak.

Christopher Wylie also testified about Russian contact with Cambridge Analytica and the campaign, voter disengagement, and his thoughts on Facebook’s response.

Mark Zuckerberg
During his testimony before Congress on April 10, 2018, Mark Zuckerberg said it was his personal mistake that he did not do enough to prevent Facebook from being used for harm. “That goes for fake news, foreign interference in elections and hate speech.” During the testimony, Mark Zuckerberg publicly apologized for the breach of private data: “It was my mistake, and I’m sorry. I started Facebook, I run it, and I’m responsible for what happens here.”

Zuckerberg said that in 2013 researcher Aleksandr Kogan from Cambridge University had created a personality quiz app, which was installed by 300,000 people. The app was then able to retrieve Facebook information, including that of the users' friends, and this was obtained by Kogan. It was not until 2015 that Zuckerberg learned that these users' information was shared by Kogan with Cambridge Analytica. Cambridge Analytica was subsequently asked to remove all the data. It was later discovered by The Guardian, The New York Times and Channel 4 that the data had in fact not been deleted.

Successors
According to the Associated Press, a company run by former officials at Cambridge Analytica, Data Propria, has been working for President Donald Trump’s 2020 re-election effort.