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According to whistleblower Christopher Wylie, during the 2014 US midtern elections, Cambridge Analytica, needing data to complete the new products it had promised to political advisor Steve Bannon, harvested private information from the Facebook profiles of more than 50 million users without their permission. There was enough information about 30 million of these users to match them to other records and build psychographic profiles.
After the news became public in March 2018, Facebook…
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A former Facebook insider explains to Wired Magazine why it's almost certain that the Trump campaign's skill using the site's internal advertising infrastructure was more important in the 2016 US presidential election than Russia's troll farm was. The first was the ads auction; the second a little-known product called Custom Audience and its accompanying Lookalike Audiences. Like Google's equivalent, Facebook's auction has advertisers bid with an ad, an ideal user specification, and a bid for…
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Caucuses, which are used in some US states as a method of voting in presidential primaries, rely on voters indicating their support for a particulate candidate by travelling to the caucus location. In a 2016 Marketplace radio interview, Tom Phillips, the CEO of Dstillery, a big data intelligence company, said that his company had collected mobile device IDs at the location for each of the political party causes during the Iowa primaries. Dstillery paired caucus-goers with their online…
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In what proved to be the first of several years of scandals over the use of personal data in illegal, anti-democratic campaigning, in 2015 the Guardian discovered that Ted Cruz's campaign for the US presidency paid at least $750,000 that year to use tens of millions of profiles of Facebook users gathered without their permission by Cambridge Analytica, owned by London-based Strategic Communications Laboratories. Financially supported by leading Republican donor Robert Mercer, CA amassed these…
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In 2016, supporters of Ted Cruz and Rand Paul for president were surprised to begin getting emails from the Trump campaign soon after their candidates dropped out of the race for the Republican nomination. In an investigation, CNNMoney found that nearly every failed 2016 presidential candidate sold, rented, or loaned their supporters' email addresses to other candidates, marketers, charities, and private companies. From analysing thousands of emails and Federal Election Commission records,…
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In 2016, the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California published a report revealing that the social media monitoring service Geofeedia had suggested it could help police track protesters. The report's publication led Twitter and Facebook to restrict Geofeedia's access to their bulk data. ACLUNC argued that even though the data is public, using it for police surveillance is an invasion of privacy. Police are not legally required to get a warrant before searching public data; however…
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Documents submitted as part of a 2015 US National Labor Relations Board investigation show that Walmart, long known to be hostile to unions, spied on and retaliated against a group of employees who sought higher wages, more full-time jobs, and predictable schedules. In combating the group, who called themselves the Organization United for Respect at Walmart (OUR Walmart), Walmart hired an intelligence-gathering service from Lockheed Martin, contacted the FBI, and set up an internal Delta team…