Before the US midterm elections in 2014, as Donald Trump prepared for the 2016 Presidential Election, Cambridge Analytica – a political consulting firm – exploited a researcher, Alexandr Kogan to create an app.
Kogan created an app – ‘This is your digital life‘
The firm projected this app as a survey tool that collected the personal data of Facebook users for academic purposes.
270,000 people were paid $1 to $2 to fill a survey that worked out these people’s personality traits.
And, the firm also collected information about people who were in the social network of these 270,000 people, thereby ‘stealing’ data of over 49 Million people.
Information collected included public profile, page likes, birthday & location, and some people also gave access to their newsfeeds, timelines, and messages.
Algorithms used this information and psychographic data to categorize people and leveraged ‘filter bubbles’ to present content that catered to the needs of these people. E.g. your ‘likes’ show you care a lot about the environment, so you were shown Trump caring about the environment.
Facebook had to bear the burden of this ‘scandal’ because of its casual approach in the matter, despite promising to the Federal Trade Commission in 2011 that it will only allow consumers’ data to be shared upon receiving consent from them.
