Trump election consultants harvested data from 50 million Facebook users ‘to target people’s demons’
The more than 50 million profiles represented about a third of active North American Facebook users, and nearly a quarter of potential US voters in 2014
Data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica harvested private information from more than 50 million Facebook users without permission to develop techniques to support President Donald Trump’s 2016 election campaign, it has emerged.
In a Saturday report, London’s Observer quoted whistle-blower Christopher Wylie, who helped set up Cambridge Analytica and worked with an academic at Cambridge University to obtain the data, as saying the system could profile individual voters to target them with personalised political advertisements.
“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,” Wylie told The Observer.
The Observer said Cambridge Analytica used the data, taken without authorisation in early 2014, to build a software program to predict and influence choices at the ballot box.
The data breach is one of the biggest in the history of Facebook Inc, The Observer and The New York Times both reported on Saturday.
In the wake of the revelation, Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey said on Twitter that her office was launching an investigation. “Massachusetts residents deserve answers immediately from Facebook and Cambridge Analytica,” she said.