The Media’s Double Standard on Privacy and Cambridge Analytica

Listening to most of the analysis of Cambridge Analytica’s use of Facebook data, one would think that our deepest, darkest secrets were pilfered from Facebook’s servers and hand-delivered to Trump Tower and the Kremlin, which skillfully used them to exploit our fears and manipulate our emotions. One could be forgiven […] Read more »

Facebook’s Surveillance Machine

In 2014, Cambridge Analytica, a voter-profiling company that would later provide services for Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, reached out with a request on Amazon’s “Mechanical Turk” platform, an online marketplace where people around the world contract with others to perform various tasks. Cambridge Analytica was looking for people who […] Read more »

Cambridge Analytica boasts of dirty tricks to swing elections

The company at the centre of the Facebook data breach boasted of using honey traps, fake news campaigns and operations with ex-spies to swing election campaigns around the world, a new investigation reveals. Executives from Cambridge Analytica spoke to undercover reporters from Channel 4 News about the dark arts used […] Read more »

How Trump Consultants Exploited the Facebook Data of Millions

As the upstart voter-profiling company Cambridge Analytica prepared to wade into the 2014 American midterm elections, it had a problem. The firm had secured a $15 million investment from Robert Mercer, the wealthy Republican donor, and wooed his political adviser, Stephen K. Bannon, with the promise of tools that could […] Read more »

Facebook bans Trump campaign’s data analytics firm for taking user data

Facebook is suspending the Trump-affiliated data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica, after learning that it failed to delete data that it had taken inappropriately from users of the social network, Facebook said late Friday. … Cambridge Analytica, a firm that specializes in using online data to create voter personality profiles in […] Read more »