With the ongoing scandal between Facebook and Cambridge Analytica, everyone seems to have been buzzed. Although it’s kind of a long and complicated story to start with, let me just give you the gist. Moreover, it’s actually what you just need to know. Cambridge Analytica is a company that deals with data mining, brokerage, and data analysis to help with the electoral process.
**To help you with the timeline of how it all started and when it all happened, click on this link here. If you have the interest to read a short summary of what happened, continue reading below. In addition, so you can also be at par of what’s happening because this is ought to be extravagantly important. **
Let me cut to the chase – just in March of this year, The New York Times and The Guardian did not fail to report that over 50 million Facebook profiles were utilized for Cambridge Analytica in an explosive data scandal. Moving forward, this number was later revised to as many as 87 million Facebook profiles.
Aleksandr Kogan, a Cambridge academic made an application last 2013, this is the “thisisyourdigitallife.”
The application is a program that Facebook users were enjoying. Why? Because this application would answer questions about a certain person’s psychological profile based on the data they have on Facebook. As per reports, almost 300, 000 people were paid to take this certain psychological test – with it harvesting their data. To make the scheme more intense and brilliant, Facebook friends of the users who took the test had their data breached as well.
With this application, Kogan was open to millions of information he was able to harvest through Facebook’s privacy and information.