What really happened between Facebook, Cambridge Analytica, and the government? What were the consequences?

Cambridge Analytica was a consulting firm that influenced many elections, its covert dealings uncovered by a previous employee that leaked information to publications. It closed in the wake of the Facebook-CA scandal.

Cambridge Analytica was tied to the Conservative Party in the UK, the British royal family and the British military. It obtained data from Facebook users through an app called myPersonality, a 100-question quiz that assessed a person’s openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. These questions, along with access to your profile data and activity, allowed Cambridge Analytica to develop models mapping your likes to your political views. (i.e. how extroverted you were was tied to your interest in certain celebrities on Facebook as indicated through your likes)

As always, a third party app accessed through facebook asks for permission to access information about your profile data, including your friend network. This allowed C.A. to further obtain information about not just you, but also your connections.

The data and models that C.A. collected and created were sold to political organizations and entities that were highly interested in this information, due to its potential to sway election outcomes. It famously influenced the outcomes of the 2016 election as well as Brexit.

This was the first major event that led to an awakening in the notion of data privacy. It spurred an onslaught of lawsuits and policies, as well as instilled a national hysteria and data "purging" efforts.

Positive impact:

• Made government more aware of cyberwarfare and the tangible value of data, making it seek ways to protect it in future elections.

• Spurred a wave of policies relating to data privacy and collection

Negative impact:

• Influenced election results to favor and skew towards a less preferable candidate who colluded with foreign entities during the 2016 election.

• Loss of government control over election results

Positive impact:

• Able to profit from selling data

• Their reach was truly borderless (this affected the Brexit decision as well) as the incident was country-agnostic

• Without regulation, they can continue to do business everywhere without much retribution.

Negative impact

• Lawsuits and intensified scrutiny for any future actions/plans

Positive impact:

• Made individuals think about where their data was and who it could be accessed by.

• Companies were made to disclose data collection information to us

Negative impact:

• This started a wave of hysteria followed subsequently by a wave of apathy towards data protection – it is now something that is incredibly normalized and although the general sentiment is that collecting user data is bad, we’re not really sure what to do about it.