Author: Ned Dymoke / Source: Big Think
The moral of the story, it should be said upfront, is be very careful who you share your information with.
Strategic Communications Laboratories (or SCL, if you’re into the whole brevity thing) has been banned from Facebook for violating their terms of service.
This, in and of itself, might not appear to have much significance. But Cambridge Analytica, the SCL-owned political data analysis firm, had digital psychographic profiles of 50 million Americans and were using those digital profiles to allowing SCL to effectively — and accurately — predict the political weather.
Donald Trump’s Political Strategy Is Inspired By Dark History Tim Wu
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Donald Trump’s Political Strategy Is Inspired By Dark History
Tim Wu
Author, The Attention Merchants
02:57
How SCL managed to achieve this reads like the opening pages of a dystopian novel. In 2014, 270,000 users installed an app built by a man called Aleksandr Kogan called ‘thisisyourdigitallife’ which ostensibly was a personality quiz based on your Facebook data. It’s one of hundreds of thousands of Facebook apps that uses your Facebook data — which includes your location, every ‘like’, and also including every click you’ve ever made on the site and often others. However, thisisyourdigitallife also created a snapshot of not just the user’s immediate social network but also of their friend’s who had not adequately set their privacy settings. So, while thisisyourdigitallife was only installed by a quarter-million people, it captured the data of approximately 50,000,000.
While Facebook is…
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