CAMBRIDGE ANALYTICA DATA BREACH SCANDAL

BUSINESS GOVERNMENT AND SOCIETY

• Aruna Bir 2210014

• Srishti Jain 2210058
TEAM • Souvik Chakraborty 2210057
MEMBERS: • Khush Lodaya 2210027
• Livingston L 2210031
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SCANDAL ROLE IN IT CONSEQUENCES

GoMech GoMech
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INTRODUCTION AND HISTORY:

 Cambridge Analytica Ltd (CA), previously known as SCL USA, was a British political consulting firm that emerged through the Facebook–Cambridge
Analytica data scandal. It was started in 2013 as a subsidiary of the private intelligence company and self-described "global election management
agency.”
 Cambridge Analytica was established as a subsidiary of the private intelligence company SCL Group that was active in military and political arenas. The
men who ran Cambridge Analytica and its parent SCL had close ties to the Conservative Party, royalty, and the British military.
 The firm had offices in London, New York City, and Washington, DC.
 The company closed operations in 2018 in the course of the Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal
 The company's owners included several of the Conservative Party's largest donors, such as billionaire Vincent Tchenguiz, former British Conservative
minister Jonathan Marland, Baron Marland, and the family of American hedge fund manager Robert Mercer.
 The company combined the misappropriation of digital assets, data mining, data brokerage, and data analysis with strategic communication during
electoral processes.
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Personal data belonging to millions of Facebook users was collected
without their consent by British consulting firm Cambridge
Analytica, predominantly to be used for political advertising
This data was then used to create psychographic-tailored
advertisements that allegedly aimed to influence people's voting
preferences in the 2016 US presidential election
 
 
FACEBOOK’S SOCIAL
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Mis-usage of the data:
 Ted Cruz Campaign: In 2016, American senator Ted Cruz hired Cambridge
Analytica to aid his presidential campaign. The Federal Election
Commission reported that Cruz paid the company $5.8 million in services.
 Donald Trump campaign: Donald Trump's 2016 presidential
campaign used the harvested data to build psychographic profiles,
determining users' personality traits based on their Facebook activity.
They constructed advertisements that accused Clinton of corruption to
make Trump a better presidential candidate.
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 The data was collected through an app called "This Is Your Digital
Life,” developed by data scientist Aleksandr Kogan and his company
Global Science Research in 2013.
 Cambridge Analytica arranged an informed consent process for
research in which several hundred thousand Facebook users would
agree to complete a survey for payment that was only for academic
use
 The app consisted of a series of questions to build psychological
profiles on users and collected the personal data of the user’s
Facebook friends via Facebook's Open Graph platform
 Facebook allowed this app not only to collect personal information
from survey respondents but also from respondents’ Facebook
friends
 The app harvested data from up to 87 million Facebook profiles
 Cambridge Analytica used the data to provide analytical assistance
to the 2016 presidential campaigns of Ted Cruz and Donald Trump
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What Happened After?

 By the end of the year, Cambridge Analytica and its parent
company SLC Group had shutted their doors
 Facebook owner Meta has agreed to pay $725m (£600m) to
settle legal action over a data breach linked to political
consultancy Cambridge Analytica.
 The public reacted to the data privacy breach by initiating the
campaign #DeleteFacebook to start a movement to boycott
Facebook. The co-founder of WhatsApp, owned by Facebook,
joined the movement by declaring it was time to delete the
platform. The hashtag was tweeted almost 400,000 times on
Twitter within 30 days after news of the data breach.

Effects of CA in other countries:

 Cambridge Analytica was scoping political and commercial work in
Australia. Cambridge. Analytica's managing director of political
operations said in a video recorded by Channel 4 that "We’ve
done it in Mexico, we’ve done it in Malaysia, we’re now moving
into Brazil, Australia, China.
 India was among the ten most-affected countries in the 2018
Cambridge Analytica data leak. 335 Indian Facebook users
installed a CA-associated app, exposing the data of their friend
networks—in total, leaking the data of 562,455 users.
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 Social Networks Changed Their Privacy Policies, Facebook

made a series of changes to its business tools, making sure that
businesses went through the proper channels to work on
behalf of other companies. Facebook locked down custom
audiences, making sure that the data collected in this manner
wouldn’t be sold to third parties.

 The California Consumer Privacy Act, or CCPA, was passed in

January 2018 and enacted in June 2018. This occurred as
Facebook and Cambridge Analytica started facing massive
backlash from their data mishandling.
 Google To Revoke Third-Party Cookie Access, Recently, Google
announced that in the next two years, it would entirely block
third-party cookies’ access to Chrome. This seems like a data-
privacy move that will impact the way many marketers do
business.