In 2014, a 27-year-old Canadian data scientist named Christopher Wylie helped design what he would later describe as a 'psychological warfare tool.' His employer, Cambridge Analytica, had paid an academic researcher to build a personality quiz that, through a quirk of Facebook's developer policy, harvested data not only on the people who took it but on every Facebook friend of every taker — eventually some 87 million profiles. The data was used to target voters in the 2016 Brexit referendum and the 2016 Trump presidential campaign. Wylie went to The Guardian in March 2018. Within ten weeks, Cambridge Analytica had shut its doors.
Technology & Surveillance
2014-2018
