https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/18/17134270/cambridge-analyticas-facebook-data-underscores-critical-flaw-american-electorate

On Friday, Facebook announced that it had suspended Strategic Communication Laboratories (SCL) and its political data analytics company, Cambridge Analytica, for violating its Terms of Service, by collecting and sharing the personal information of up to 50 million users without their consent. The incident is demonstrative of ways that Facebook’s core business model — delivering individualized ads to users — can be exploited, while raising uncomfortable questions about how such data might have been used to influence the 2016 presidential campaign.

Cambridge Analytica is owned in part by hedge fund billionaire Richard Mercer, and first aided Senator Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign in 2015, before helping the Trump campaign in 2016. It promised to target voters’ “unconscious psychological biases,” by using massive amounts of data develop personality profiles, which could then be used to create extremely specific ads. According to Vox, the Trump campaign brought Cambridge Analytica on in June 2016 to help with its digital operations, headed up by Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner. The campaign later named Steve Bannon — a former vice presidents of Cambridge Analytica — as campaign manager. Cambridge Analytica employee Christopher Wylie recently passed information to The Observer and described the company’s work as a “grossly unethical experiment,” and said that they exploited Facebook to harvest the personal information of millions of people and “built models to exploit what we knew about them and target their inner demons.”