NY Times: Consultants to the Trump campaign accessed 50 million Facebook accounts illegally (UPDATE)
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UPDATE: Directly above, we have added a video posted by NBC News of Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix. Nix did not know he was being taped as reporters from NBC News' U.K. partner ITN Channel 4 News pose as potential clients who want to disrupt the Sri Lankan elections.
UPDATE:
According to a report in today's New York Times, a company called Cambridge Analytica illegally grabbed data from 50 million Facebook profiles without the permission of the account owners. This was allegedly done for the 2014 mid-term elections as Cambridge was the recipient of a $15 million investment from loaded Republican donor Robert Mercer. Cambridge also attracted the attention of Mercer's political advisor, Stephen Bannon, by promising to develop a method to identify personality traits of U.S. voters and guide them into voting GOP.
Cambridge still has control of this data, and Facebook has yet to state that the data was stolen from it. As it turns out, Cambridge says that it paid for the data from a researcher who claimed that he was collecting it for academic reasons. The researcher, a Russian-American by the name of Aleksandr Kogan, has been suspended from using Facebook along with Cambridge Analytica and the latter's co-founder, Christopher Wylie.
Is there something shady about Cambridge Analtyical? Consider that CEO Nix was recorded by Channel 4 TV in Britain as saying that he has used front companies and ex-spies on behalf of political clients. But the political clients are getting harder to find. In fact, no American campaigns have appeared to sign up for the company's services for the 2018 mid-term election, and it is unknown whether the Trump 2020 re-election campaign will use them again.
![Email from Russian-American professor Aleksandr Kogan to Cambridge Analytica co-founder Christopher Wylie detailing the kinds of traits that can be predicted using data from Facebook and a questionnaire - NY Times: Consultants to the Trump campaign accessed 50 million Facebook accounts illegally (UPDATE)](https://m-cdn.phonearena.com/images/articles/318601-image/cama.jpg)
Email from Russian-American professor Aleksandr Kogan to Cambridge Analytica co-founder Christopher Wylie detailing the kinds of traits that can be predicted using data from Facebook and a questionnaire
source: NYTimes, NBC
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