Trump Consultants Harvested Private Facebook Information of Millions of Users

Cambridge Analytica, the vote-profiling company invested by Robert Mercer, one of the largest Republican donors and supported by his political adviser, Stephen K. Bannon, is facing overwhelming criticism and crisis regarding its analysis of the 2014 American midterm elections.

Despite the promise the firm made to its investors of identifying trends and mindsets of American voters during the election, the firm did not have enough data to work with and had to resort to using private information from Facebook. They harvested user data of over 50 million users without permission in order to compile enough patterns and data to find techniques in leading the 2016 campaign of President Trump. This has become one of the largest information leaks over social media in history and incited great controversy and tension.

This breach was revealed by an investigation of the New York Times and the Observer of London, shedding light on Cambridge Analytica’s behavior of using private social media data to influence politics and polls. Traces of this breach, though previously mentioned in a few accounts, was not fully surfaced until now and Facebook still has not acknowledged this information leak officially.

The firm’s techniques are called psychographic modeling, which since then has led to much suspicion and distrust from users and investors. The co-founder and a former employee of the company, Christopher Wylie, remarked that the company “want to fight a culture war in America” and that “Cambridge Analytica was supposed to be the arsenal of weapons to fight that culture war.”

According to Facebook, Cambridge Analytica has been collecting this data under academic purposes and in fact, the firm possesses most of the information it has acquired through Facebook. Facebook has shifted its original stance of downplaying the severity of the leak to releasing an official statement, guaranteeing immediate action to take place to prevent further leaks and to retrieve the user data.

On the other hand, the chief executive of Cambridge Analytica, Alexander Nix, along with other officials, have denied their usage of Facebook private data. However, their statements seemed to contradict each other as the company had admitted to acquiring the data to the Times and blamed its researcher, Aleksandr Logan, for breaching the rules and keeping the information it was supposed to remove immediately after analysis.

Robert Mercer, who has invested $15 million in Cambridge Analytica, is now facing scrutiny and warnings from his lawyer for illegally employing foreign companies and stakeholders in US political campaigns.

This breach also led to increasing scrutiny and questions towards Facebook. Already toiled with criticism over fake news and Russian propaganda from earlier this year, Facebook is now facing new challenges regarding its information security. Most of the information acquired by Cambridge Analytica is not permitted by the users and that puts into question of Facebook’s protection and security system regarding user information that sits at the base of people’s relationship with social media in general.

This pattern of hiring foreigners for analysis of campaign trends and voter behaviors is not uncommon. In 2016 Mr. Cruz and Mr. Trump both directly worked with Cambridge Analytica, which hired majority citizens of the United Kingdom or other European countries for data research and analysis.

This exposure on Cambridge Analytica’s breach of private information is a blow to both Facebook and the company itself, as there has been no confirmation of any American campaigns that will invest in the company for the 2018 midterms. Even its former investor, President Trump, has not released any statement regarding its future cooperation with the firm for his re-election.

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