Cambridge

Analyti ca - Ca se
Study

•Presented By : -
 • It’s a company that "uses data to change audience behavior," both
commercially and politically, according to its website.

Who is • Its London-based affiliate, SCL Group, has a history of dubious

tricks in elections around the globe. Cambridge Analytica worked
Cambridge in support of the 2016 campaigns of Trump, Ted Cruz and Ben
Carson, all Republicans.
Analytica
• It was founded in 2013 by former Renaissance Technologies co-
CEO Robert Mercer, a major supporter of Trump in 2016; Trump’s
campaign manager, Steve Bannon, served on the firm’s board.
Who took what
from Facebook?

During the summer of 2014, the U.K. affiliate of U.S. political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica hired a Soviet-born American
researcher, Aleksandr Kogan, to gather basic profile information of Facebook users along with what they chose to “Like.”

About 300,000 Facebook users, most or all of whom were paid a small amount, downloaded Kogan’s app, called This Is Your Digital
Life, which presented them with a series of surveys.

Kogan collected data not just on those users but on their Facebook friends, if their privacy settings allowed it -- a universe of people
initially estimated to be 50 million strong, then upped to 87 million.

The app, in its terms of service, disclosed that it would collect data on users and their friends.
Kogan’s on having Facebook’s permission

• In a general sense, yes. Since 2007, Facebook has allowed outside developers to build and offer their
own applications within its space.

• When Kogan offered his app, Facebook also allowed developers to collect information on friends of
those who chose to use their apps if their privacy settings allowed it.

• Kogan also wrote in a March 18, “We clearly stated that the users were granting us the right to use the
data in broad scope, including selling and licensing the data”
Cambridge Analytica purpose behind
user’s data
• It uses such data to target voters with hyper-specific appeals, including on Facebook and other
online services, that go well beyond traditional messaging based on party affiliation alone. This is
known as "psychographic" targeting or modeling.

• The United Kingdom announced it intended to fine Facebook $663,000 over the data
breach. The federal trade commission voted to approve fining Facebook around $5 billion.

• In July 2019, Facebook agreed to pay $100 million to settle with the U.S securities and exchange
commission for misleading investors about the risks it faced from misuse of user data.

• The Facebook said it, remove quiz app from the platform in 2015 and it demanded that the CA
confirms they have deleted all the harvested data.
 Did any of this violate any rules?

• Definitely, the whole act was unethical based on the given facts.

• The U.K. has data-protection laws that ban the sale or use of personal data without
consent. And in 2011, Facebook settled privacy complaints by the U.S. Federal Trade
Commission by agreeing to get clear consent from users before sharing their material.

• This relatively new phenomenon as well as the ethical aspect of the unofficial and
uncontrollable usage of personal data have been researched in detail in this article.

• The events following the circumstances that came to light and led to the bankruptcy of
Cambridge Analytica, the implementation of stricter rules regarding the usage of
personal data and the adaptation of GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation, 2016)
have been analyzed by the authors
 Did the Facebook or CA data help
Trump win the presidency?
• Cambridge Analytica flatly denied using Facebook data from Kogan’s firm in the 2016 election or employing
psychographic modeling techniques on behalf of Trump’s campaign.

• The CA collected this information by breaking Facebook's rules.

• The users were supposed to vote in a certain way by showing different advertisements on the same issue, to
different people.

• By this they would be able to convince many different people with different personalities by using
personalized, targeted advertisements.

• Whether Cambridge Analytica’s models really work is itself a point of contention; even some of the firm’s
clients have said they saw little value in it.
 What could have been done
differently ?
• Regression used for training Machine Learning model on available data sets and
predicting a new user’s political affiliation.

• Microtargeting is not a bad thing if the rules to obtain data are followed.

• CA should have targeted group of voters by rallies and public speaking rather
than targeting individual voter on social media.

• They should hav e g o n e direct ly t o t he support ers of t he campaign and ask

them explicitly to grant them permission to the information.

• Facebook should hav e t ak en some st rict act ions t o delet e t he dat a collect ed by
CA because the steps taken by Facebook were too little to remedy the situation.

• There are plent y of legal w ay s for campaigns t o get informat ion about t he
voters and used them in an appropriate way.
 Conclusion
• The situation with Cambridge Analytica is the precedent. It
is far from being over and it is difficult to give any further
predictions. Moreover, for the first time ever the authors
give such detailed and in-depth research of Cambridge
Analytica case and anticipate several scenarios for its
future development.

• The world has not met such a precedent before. It is very

difficult to make further predictions. It is obvious that the
American model, in other words Silicon Valley model, of
information society development, driven by the market, is
seriously disrupted.

• To develop legislative basis which will help to restrict

significantly the operation of companies like Cambridge
Analytica and exclude the possibility of the worldwide
uncontrolled use of personal data in social networks