HOW TO THINK ABOUT IT

Look behind the veil. On paper, Cambridge Analytica is a strategic communications firm offering clients behavioral research to optimize their marketing methods. In reality, critics say, the firm exploited both Facebook and the name of a world-class institution to surreptitiously tip the scales for its high-profile clients, including the Trump campaign. The firm paid to acquire the private Facebook data through a Russian-American professor named Aleksandr Kogan at the University of Cambridge, who claimed to be using it for academic purposes. Kogan has received Russian government research grants in the past, but claims he had no idea what Cambridge Analytica was really doing with the data.

Click here to see your perfect president. The data was originally mined from Facebook users under the guise of a personality testing app called “thisisyourdigitallife.” That data included information from more than 50 million Facebook profiles because of Cambridge’s ability to gather information from friends of the personality test users. The data was then used for crafting personalized political ads as well as Trump campaign strategy.

The trail of your ‘digital breadcrumbs.’ Often described as the world’s largest and most lucrative advertising platform, Facebook plays a central role in making your personal data available to thousands of apps, whose aim is to collect user information. It’s often sold to data brokers like Acxiom, which effectively own your “digital breadcrumbs.” Companies like Farmville and Tinder, as well as Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign, use Facebook data. All such activity has been loosely regulated thus far — but that could change after the Cambridge Analytica revelations.

What’s on your mind, Facebook? USA Today calls the data-harvesting crisis a “catastrophic moment” for Facebook. Yet the company’s response has been uncharacteristically slow, aside from its initial threats to sue The Observer, the British newspaper that broke the story. “The entire company is outraged we were deceived,” a Facebook statement noted days after the reports. On Wednesday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg went further: “This was a major breach of trust, and I’m really sorry that this happened.” Meanwhile, the story has hammered the company’s stock price, left employees demoralized and prompted the hashtag #deletefacebook.

Let the investigations begin. Cambridge Analytica is facing investigations by parliament and government regulators in Britain while Facebook confronts federal and state investigations into its mishandling of user data. Federal Trade Commission fines for the violations could potentially reach $2 trillion.

WHAT TO READ

Trump’s High-Tech Dirty Tricksters, by Michelle Goldberg in The New York Times
"Whether or not Cambridge Analytica’s methodology works, the fact that the Trump campaign had a crew of high-tech dirty tricksters on its payroll is significant."

Silicon Valley Has Failed to Protect Our Data. Here’s How to Fix It, by Paul Ford in Bloomberg Businessweek
"When it comes to toxic data spills, it’s hard to know just how exposed you are. Literally all of us have been hacked — hard and a lot and mostly behind our backs."

WHAT TO WATCH