On March 17, news broke that Cambridge Analytica, a data analytics firm that worked with Donald Trump’s election campaign, had harvested over 50 million users’ Facebook data without permission. The firm combined a range of users’ data, including “non-sensitive” information such as status updates and Facebook likes, with other sources of information (such as electoral rolls) to build psychographic profiles and target people based on their preferences and susceptibilities. As Christopher Wylie, a former data scientist at Cambridge Analytica and the whistle-blower behind the revelations, explained, the firm combined “micro-targeting” with constructs from psychology so that “we would not only be targeting you as a voter, we would be targeting you as a personality”.
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