Twelve days before Donald Trump won the biggest upset in presidential history, his data team was feeling confident. “We have three major voter suppression operations under way,” a senior campaign official told Bloomberg, a reference to Democratic voters the campaign hoped would stay at home on Election Day. The campaign might have been down in the polls, but it had an ace up its sleeve: Data supplied by Cambridge Analytica, a London-based team funded by the ultra-wealthy Mercer family. When Trump won, the campaign’s digital operation got a lot of the credit. Two weeks ago, Trump named its director, Brad Parscale, the campaign manager for his 2020 reelection bid.

But on Friday evening, Facebook made a surprising announcement: It was suspending Cambridge Analytica for improperly obtaining—and failing to destroy—data that it had acquired in 2014. A day later, The New York Times and the London Observer published investigations into Cambridge Analytica that revealed that the company had “harvested data” from 50 million Facebook profiles, most of whom were American voters.



Facebook has strenuously denied that this constituted a “data breach.” Instead it has placed the blame squarely on Cambridge Analytica for misrepresenting its intentions and violating its terms of use. But while the harvesting of data isn’t a “breach” in the hacking sense, that doesn’t mean Facebook was an innocent victim. Yes, Cambridge Analytica is a bad actor, but it was also using Facebook the way that Facebook is intended to be used: to sell people products, to guide their choices—in short, to manipulate them. Facebook’s response to the data harvesting reveals a company that not only has lax privacy protections and an existential aversion to transparency, but also one that is publicly in denial about what it is selling.



The scandal revealed by the Times and the Observer dates back to 2014, when Cambridge Analytica hired Alexsandr Kogan, a Russian-American academic, to harvest Facebook data and build “psychographic” profiles that would be used in persuasion campaigns. Kogan then built an app and enlisted Facebook users to take a survey, for which they were paid a small amount of money.



At that time, Facebook’s terms of service gave app developers access to a wealth of data. In the old terms of service, app developers would not only get the data from the profiles of those using the apps, but from all of their friends as well. So Kogan harvested the data of the 270,000 people who took his survey, as well as their mates. As first reported by The Intercept, this gave Cambridge Analytica data from 50 million Facebook users—30 million of which became subject of psychographic profiles.

