![]() The discovery of the unprecedented data harvesting, and the use to which it was put, raises urgent new questions about Facebook’s role in targeting voters in the US presidential election. Facebook’s “platform policy” allowed only collection of friends’ data to improve user experience in the app and barred it being sold on or used for advertising. However, the app also collected the information of the test-takers’ Facebook friends, leading to the accumulation of a data pool tens of millions-strong. Through his company Global Science Research (GSR), in collaboration with Cambridge Analytica, hundreds of thousands of users were paid to take a personality test and agreed to have their data collected for academic use. The data was collected through an app called thisisyourdigitallife, built by academic Aleksandr Kogan, separately from his work at Cambridge University. ![]() The New York Times is reporting that copies of the data harvested for Cambridge Analytica could still be found online its reporting team had viewed some of the raw data. ![]() The conservative mega‑donors backed Breitbart, Bannon and, most influentially, poured millions into Trump’s presidential campaign. The fortysomething, the second of Mercer’s three daughters, heads up the family foundation which channels money to rightwing groups. Rebekah Mercer has a maths degree from Stanford, and worked as a trader, but her influence comes primarily from her father’s billions. An AI expert, he made a fortune with quantitative trading pioneers Renaissance Technologies, then built a $60m war chest to back conservative causes by using an offshore investment vehicle to avoid US tax. Robert Mercer, 71, is a computer scientist and hedge fund billionaire, who used his fortune to become one of the most influential men in US politics as a top Republican donor. By August 2017 his relationship with Trump had soured and he was out. That earned Bannon the post of chief strategist to the president and for a while he was arguably the second most powerful man in America. Bannon encouraged the reality TV star to embrace the “populist, economic nationalist” agenda that would carry him into the White House. In August 2016 he became Donald Trump’s campaign CEO. He changed his name to Spectre when he married, but later reverted to Kogan.Ī former investment banker turned “alt-right” media svengali, Steve Bannon was boss at website Breitbart when he met Christopher Wylie and Nix and advised Robert Mercer to invest in political data research by setting up CA. ![]() ![]() While at Cambridge he accepted a position at St Petersburg State University, and also took Russian government grants for research. He set up Global Science Research (GSR) to carry out CA’s data research. He studied at the University of California, Berkeley, and got his PhD at the University of Hong Kong before joining Cambridge as a lecturer in psychology and expert in social media psychometrics. He set up Cambridge Analytica to work in America, with investment from Robert Mercer.Īleksandr Kogan was born in Moldova and lived in Moscow until the age of seven, then moved with his family to the US, where he became a naturalised citizen. From 2007 he took over the company’s elections division, and claims to have worked on 260 campaigns globally. An Old Etonian with a degree from Manchester University, Nix, 42, worked as a financial analyst in Mexico and the UK before joining SCL, a strategic communications firm, in 2003. ![]()
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