‘You Are the Product’: Targeted by Cambridge Analytica on Facebook

Christopher Deason stumbled upon the psychological questionnaire on June 9, 2014. He was taking a lot of online surveys back then, each one earning him a few dollars to help pay the bills. Nothing about this one, which he saw on an online job platform, struck him as “creepy or weird,” he said later. …

But The Times, which has viewed a set of raw data from the profiles that Cambridge Analytica paid an academic researcher to obtain, contacted nearly two dozen affected Facebook users in recent weeks. Some were angry — one woman compared it to being robbed — while others were annoyed but unsurprised, having grown cynical about tech giants’ use of the data they collect. They are the first known affected Facebook users to be publicly identified. And nearly all said the misuse of their data had given them second thoughts about staying on Facebook. CONT.

Matthew Rosenberg & Gabriel J.X. Dance, New York Times