Cambridge Analytica, a London based data mining and data analytics firm is alleged to have tapped over 50 million Facebook profiles of Americans to influence the Trump Presidential Campaign in US 2016 Polls.
As per the details available from UK’s renowned news source Guardian, Cambridge Analytica is known to build psychological profiles in order to categorize individual voters for campaigns.
Cybersecurity Insiders has learned that in 2014 the firm was approached by a close aide to Trump for creating a platform filled with positive propaganda on social media. The firm then started to create profiles of individual US voters who can be targeted with personalized political advertisements in future.
The campaign started with ‘This is your Digital Life’ which claimed to be a research program used by psychologists. Around 270,000 people from America is said to have downloaded the app and gave permission to it to access data from their Facebook profiles including their likes and info about friends.
In reality, the app was not meant to nurture the research of psychologists but was, in fact, a secret mission employed by Cambridge Analytica to know the pulse of US voters in the upcoming 2016 US elections.
From here, things went in favor of the UK based data analytics firm without any hiccups.
On knowing these facts in March 2017, Facebook suspended the data harvesting app owned by University of Cambridge Psychology professor Aleksandra Kogan.
Later Cambridge Analytica issued a public statement that it destroyed the entire info in 2015 and was in no way connected to the influence the US 2016 polls in favor of Donald Trump.
An undercover interview of Cambridge Analytica’s CEO Alexander Nix was about to be aired by Channel 4 in November 2017. But the broadcast was blocked by some top-notch politicians from the trump administration at the last minute.
