Cambridge Analytica

» see cambridgeanalytica.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Almost everything else buried on this site is something people chose. You signed up, or installed it, or at least knew the name of the thing holding your data. Cambridge Analytica belongs here on the opposite footing. Up to 87 million people were inside it without having heard of it, and most of them learned the name in March 2018 while reading about themselves.

In 2018 I was 34 and working in Ankara, with a Facebook account like everyone else I knew. I followed the story as news, because there was no account to close and nothing to uninstall. Whatever of mine was in there had been in there for four years already.

Cambridge Analytica was incorporated in 2013 as the American-facing arm of SCL Group, a British outfit that had spent two decades selling behavioral influence work to governments and militaries. Robert Mercer's family put in at least fifteen million dollars. Steve Bannon served as vice president and is credited with choosing the name. Alexander Nix ran it. The pitch was psychographic targeting: score voters on personality traits, then aim different messages at different psychological profiles. Nix claimed close to five thousand data points on each of 230 million Americans.

What it actually held, and how it came to hold it, is the part that ended the company.

~ the case file ~

~ the quiz ~

In 2014 Aleksandr Kogan, then a psychology lecturer at Cambridge, ran an app called thisisyourdigitallife. It was a personality quiz and about 270,000 people took it. Facebook's platform at the time let an app read not only its user's profile but their friends' profiles too, so 270,000 consenting quiz-takers delivered a graph that Facebook would later put at up to 87 million people. Kogan passed the data to Cambridge Analytica. That broke Facebook's rules and nothing in Facebook's technical design.

Facebook closed the friends permission in 2015 and asked for the data to be deleted, then took the company's word that this had happened. The gap between a policy violation and any means of detecting one is what the following three years were really about.

~ one week in March ~

Christopher Wylie, who had worked on building the models, went on the record with the Observer and the New York Times, and both published on 17 March 2018. On the 19th, Channel 4 News aired undercover footage of Nix describing bribery stings and honey traps to a prospective client. He was suspended the next day. On the 23rd the Information Commissioner's Office obtained a warrant and searched the London offices.

Facebook lost roughly a hundred billion dollars of market value inside ten days, and Mark Zuckerberg was called to testify before Congress in April. "Delete Facebook" had its first real moment. For Cambridge Analytica the damage was simpler and faster than any of that: the clients left.

~ the keycards ~

On 2 May 2018 the company announced it was ceasing all operations immediately. SCL Elections and its British affiliates filed to begin insolvency proceedings in the United Kingdom, with a parallel bankruptcy filed in the United States Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York. The statement said that "unfairly negative media coverage" had "driven away virtually all of the Company's customers and suppliers" and left the business no longer viable.

Employees in the American offices were told to hand over their keycards. That was the notice. Six weeks earlier the same firm had been selling itself as the company that understood the electorate better than the electorate understood itself.

~ what outlived it ~

Most of the assets went to Emerdata, a holding company registered before the collapse and headed by Julian Wheatland, who had been chief executive of Cambridge Analytica and of other SCL companies. The names on the directors' filings overlapped heavily with the firm that had just closed. In September 2020 Nix accepted a seven-year ban on acting as a company director, effective from 5 October, having not disputed that he let the SCL companies market potentially unethical services, bribery stings and voter disengagement work among them.

The longer inheritance is regulatory. Cambridge Analytica became the reference point for every data-protection argument since, and it closed three weeks before GDPR took effect, which handed the new European rules a story people already knew. cambridgeanalytica.org answers today under an unrelated operator, as a privacy advice site.

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