Cambridge Analytica was a data analytics company that built voter profiles from personal data obtained through Facebook. Its documented record is a Federal Trade Commission enforcement action.
The FTC case
On 24 July 2019 the FTC filed an administrative complaint against Cambridge Analytica and settled, subject to public comment, with two individuals: the company’s former chief executive Alexander Nix and the app developer Aleksandr Kogan. The Commission alleged that all three “employed deceptive tactics to harvest personal information from tens of millions of Facebook users for voter profiling and targeting,” and specifically that they “deceived consumers by falsely claiming they did not collect any personally identifiable information from Facebook users who were asked to answer survey questions and share some of their Facebook profile data.”
Kogan’s application, the GSRApp — also known as “thisisyourdigitallife” — asked users to answer personality and other questions and collected information including the likes of public Facebook pages by the app’s users and by the friends in their networks, from the summer of 2014.
Nix and Kogan agreed to administrative orders restricting their future conduct and requiring them to delete or destroy the personal information they had collected. Cambridge Analytica itself had filed for bankruptcy and did not settle the allegations.
The FTC announced separately that Facebook would pay a $5 billion penalty and accept new restrictions in a settlement of allegations that it had violated a 2012 FTC privacy order.
Relevance to digital political discourse
The case is the reference point for how platform data reached political targeting operations: the mechanism was not a breach but an ordinary quiz app that collected data on people who never installed it, through the friend permissions the platform then granted. The regulatory consequence fell on the platform — the $5 billion Facebook penalty — while the firm that built the profiles went bankrupt without ever answering the complaint.
Sources
- 01.
Federal Trade Commission. FTC Sues Cambridge Analytica, Settles with Former CEO and App Developer. (2019). Source for the FTC's administrative complaint against Cambridge Analytica; the settlements with former CEO Alexander Nix and app developer Aleksandr Kogan; the allegation that the three deceived consumers by falsely claiming they collected no personally identifiable information; the description of Kogan's GSRApp, also called "thisisyourdigitallife"; the collection of app users' and their friends' page likes from summer 2014; and the statement that Cambridge Analytica had filed for bankruptcy and had not settled.
- 02.
Federal Trade Commission. Cambridge Analytica, LLC, In the Matter of — case docket 182-3107. The FTC's case file, including the Administrative Part 3 Complaint of 24 July 2019 and the subsequent summary decision filings.