Cambridge Analytica
A psychology professor's personality quiz harvested 87 million Facebook profiles. A consulting firm used them to micro-target two political earthquakes.
In 2014, a Cambridge psychology researcher named Aleksandr Kogan built an app called "thisisyourdigitallife". It looked like a small academic project: take a personality quiz, share your Facebook profile, get a profile back.
The 87 million
The quiz attracted about 270,000 participants. Under the Facebook API of the day, that was enough to also pull data on the friends of each participant — roughly 87 million people in total, almost none of whom had heard of the app.
Kogan handed the dataset to Cambridge Analytica, a London-based consulting firm co-founded by Steve Bannon and bankrolled by the American hedge fund family of Robert Mercer. The firm advertised "psychographic" microtargeting: using your digital exhaust to model your personality and serve you political ads tuned to push your specific psychological levers.
Two elections, one whistleblower
Cambridge Analytica was retained by the Brexit-aligned Leave.EU campaign and by the Trump 2016 operation. How much its psychographics actually influenced outcomes is still debated. What is not debated is the data. Christopher Wylie, a former Cambridge Analytica employee, walked into the Observer's office in 2018 with the contracts, the file paths, and the receipts.
What the chronicle remembers
The Cambridge Analytica story is less about a breach than about consent. The data was not stolen in any technical sense. It was given to Facebook by users, and given by Facebook, under the terms of an API documented in plain English, to anyone who built an app like Kogan's. The scandal exposed that the infrastructure of modern social platforms had been quietly leaky from the start.