Revealed: 50 million Facebook profiles harvested for Cambridge Analytica in major data breach

[Jacque67 7,328]

The data analytics firm that worked with Donald Trump’s election team and the winning Brexit campaign harvested millions of Facebook profiles of US voters, in one of the tech giant’s biggest ever data breaches, and used them to build a powerful software program to predict and influence choices at the ballot box.

A whistleblower has revealed to the Observer how Cambridge Analytica – a company owned by the hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, and headed at the time by Trump’s key adviser Steve Bannon – used personal information taken without authorisation in early 2014 to build a system that could profile individual US voters, in order to target them with personalised political advertisements.

Christopher Wylie, who worked with a Cambridge University academic to obtain the data, told the Observer: “We exploited Facebook to harvest millions of people’s profiles. And built models to exploit what we knew about them and target their inner demons. That was the basis the entire company was built on.”

Documents seen by the Observer, and confirmed by a Facebook statement, show that by late 2015 the company had found out that information had been harvested on an unprecedented scale. However, at the time it failed to alert users and took only limited steps to recover and secure the private information of more than 50 million individuals.

[Jacque67 7,328]

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/17/cambridge-analytica-facebook-influence-us-election

[JimandChristy 1,689]

Add it to the mounting evidence of corruption and scandals of the Fat Orange Nixon.

[Jacque67 7,328]

“[Bannon] got it immediately. He believes in the whole Andrew Breitbart doctrine that politics is downstream from culture, so to change politics you need to change culture. And fashion trends are a useful proxy for that. Trump is like a pair of Uggs, or Crocs, basically. So how do you get from people thinking ‘Ugh. Totally ugly’ to the moment when everyone is wearing them? That was the inflection point he was looking for.”

But Wylie wasn’t just talking about fashion. He had recently been exposed to a new discipline: “information operations”, which ranks alongside land, sea, air and space in the US military’s doctrine of the “five-dimensional battle space”. His brief ranged across the SCL Group – the British government has paid SCL to conduct counter-extremism operations in the Middle East, and the US Department of Defense has contracted it to work in Afghanistan.

I tell him that another former employee described the firm as “MI6 for hire”, and I’d never quite understood it.

“It’s like dirty MI6 because you’re not constrained. There’s no having to go to a judge to apply for permission. It’s normal for a ‘market research company’ to amass data on domestic populations. And if you’re working in some country and there’s an auxiliary benefit to a current client with aligned interests, well that’s just a bonus.”

[Jacque67 7,328]

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/17/data-war-whistleblower-christopher-wylie-faceook-nix-bannon-trump

[Jacque67 7,328]

9 minutes ago, JimandChristy said:

Add it to the mounting evidence of corruption and scandals of the Fat Orange Nixon.

CA is diaping out online atm

people need2chil

[Dashinka 23,247]

Wow, another tingling leg thread.  

[Jacque67 7,328]

Interesting choice of words.

[Dashinka 23,247]

8 minutes ago, Jacque67 said:

Interesting choice of words.

You can thank Chris Matthews when you see him.

[Jacque67 7,328]

Matthews said "I felt a thrill going up my legs" which is very different.

 

Dr Spectre approves though. Happy St Patrick's Day!

[Jacque67 7,328]

Just remembered. Kushner hired these guys. When will Ivanka ditch him?

[JimandChristy 1,689]

3 minutes ago, Jacque67 said:

Just remembered. Kushner hired these guys. When will Ivanka ditch him?

The whole Trump family is corrupt, Trump Jr is getting divorced, Donnie cheats on his wives constantly, he had an affair with a porn star while his wife was carrying his baby! Evangelical leaders are sick to the core, preach for years about family values blah blah but Trump gets a pass because he got someone on the Supreme Court. They've lost all credibility in what they supposedly stood for.

Edited March 17, 2018 by JimandChristy

[Voice of Reason 10,298]

30 minutes ago, JimandChristy said:

The whole Trump family is corrupt, Trump Jr is getting divorced, Donnie cheats on his wives constantly, he had an affair with a porn star while his wife was carrying his baby! Evangelical leaders are sick to the core, preach for years about family values blah blah but Trump gets a pass because he got someone on the Supreme Court. They've lost all credibility in what they supposedly stood for.

Is infidelity an issue for you?  How un-liberated!  I thought that whole marital fidelity thing was against most liberals’ belief?

[Jacque67 7,328]

44 minutes ago, JimandChristy said:

The whole Trump family is corrupt, Trump Jr is getting divorced, Donnie cheats on his wives constantly, he had an affair with a porn star while his wife was carrying his baby! Evangelical leaders are sick to the core, preach for years about family values blah blah but Trump gets a pass because he got someone on the Supreme Court. They've lost all credibility in what they supposedly stood for.

I think the affair with Stormy started 4 months after Barron was born, but yeah for the rest.

[Jacque67 7,328]

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/17/us/politics/cambridge-analytica-russia.html

 

Cambridge Analytica was in contact with Luckoil 2014-2015. Luckoil was interested in how data was used to target American voters. Hmmmm....