Cambridge Analytica: Overview, History, and Example

Cambridge Analytica was a consulting company that specialized in using data science methodologies to support political campaigns. The company declared bankruptcy in 2018 following legal and political fallout from its use of personal data it obtained from almost 90 million Facebook (currently META) users.

What Was Cambridge Analytica?

Cambridge Analytica was founded in 2013. It was the offshoot of a British company, SCL Group (formerly Strategic Communication Laboratories), and was set up as a U.S. subsidiary company of SCL. It targeted Facebook and other social media platforms during its early days to run advertisements based on user profiles. They included ads for political campaigns.

The company became the subject of widespread criticism in 2018 following reports that it purchased data from a British academic concerning the personal psychological profile of roughly 270,000 Facebook users.

It was able to indirectly access data from the Facebook friends of those users due to the terms and conditions of the Facebook platform at that time. Cambridge Analytica was able to access a far larger pool of data regarding 87 million users in this manner without the knowledge or consent of almost any of them.

Cambridge Analytica was able to use the data points it collected to build models that allowed psychological profiling of a variety of users including their political affinities, whether they were extroverts or introverts, and how they would react to certain campaigns.

Real-World Examples of Cambridge Analytica

The public’s concern regarding Cambridge Analytica was based not only on its acquisition of personal information but also on the way the company reportedly used that information. The company allegedly used this data in support of various clients’ political campaigns, effectively using people’s psychological profiles to influence their political decisions.

Two notable examples of campaigns with ties to Cambridge Analytica are the Leave campaign in the 2016 Brexit referendum debate and President Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign. A reporter filmed the company executive, Alexander Nix, in a sting operation proudly claiming that his firm did all the data research, mining, and analytics work for Trump’s campaign.

He allegedly also bragged about the unethical practices the company used to expose corrupt politicians in foreign elections thereby influencing the outcomes.

Nix was suspended from his post following the revelations in March 2018 and Facebook suspended all SCL's accounts for failing to delete the key data points the company collected from the social media platform. Several of the company’s key personnel have since founded or moved to other companies engaged in political consulting based on data science techniques, however.

The Bottom Line

Cambridge Analytica is a now-defunct political consulting company that declared bankruptcy in 2018 after targeting the psychological profiles of nearly 90 million Facebook users during President Trump’s 2016 campaign. The firm used data points it had collected to create psychological profiles of users and then target them based on how they would likely react to campaigns.

Numerous social media platforms have made changes to prevent such a thing from happening again.