Cambridge Analytica scandal
The Cambridge Analytica scandal was a major data privacy and political controversy that erupted in 2018, involving the unauthorized harvesting of personal data from millions of Facebook users.
Key Points:
What happened: Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting firm, improperly collected data from around 87 million Facebook profiles without users' consent.
How it happened: A personality quiz app called "This Is Your Digital Life", created by researcher Aleksandr Kogan, collected not only data from people who used the app but also from their Facebook friends. The data was then sold to Cambridge Analytica.
Purpose of the data: The firm used the information to build psychological profiles and target voters with personalized political ads, especially during the 2016 U.S. presidential election and the Brexit referendum.
Fallout:
- Facebook faced intense scrutiny and CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified before U.S. Congress.
- Facebook was fined $5 billion by the FTC for privacy violations.
- Cambridge Analytica filed for bankruptcy in 2018.
- The scandal sparked global debates on data privacy, social media regulation, and the ethics of political advertising.
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