Yeah, I know. I had to spell his name right to find him in the Companies House database, but it didn’t carry over to here 
The Mercer family though, eh?
No.
In addition the answers to the questions, the App in question asked for and received permission to use the persons Facebook profile data. At the time this was done, it was a large amount of data and it included all the same data from your friends.
I’m this way, a couple of hundred thousand who ran the app, passed on data on 50 million Facebook users.
Facebook has since tightened things up, but the data was already in in the wild.
A few years ago there used to be viral things knocking about Facebook along the lines of
OK, so that’s the answers to two very common security questions you’ve just shared to your friends and thousands of strangers. Oh, and your page is pretty open, so we’ve got your name, where you live, what schools you attended, when your birthday is. This identity theft thing is now a lot easier!
Since Cambridge Analytica was a US spin off from SCL, I see this as meaningless unless he has been removed from his position at SCL as well as CA.
As noted, the Mercers provided the funding to create Cambridge Analytica and brought Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway to the Trump campaign after Cruz failed to win the nomination.
In case anyone hasn’t seen the BBC Channel 4 videos that started the whole uproar:
Cambridge Analytica Uncovered: Secret filming reveals election tricks
Cambridge Analytica: Undercover Secrets of Trump’s Data Firm
Cambridge Analytica: Whistleblower reveals data grab of 50 million Facebook profiles
Minor pedantry: Channel 4 is not a BBC station. It’s a separate, independent, statutory not-for-profit public service broadcaster, funded by advertising.
Additional pedantry. They are state owned and allowed to make and keep up to 10% profit for future investment. Anything above that gets paid into the Treasury.
It’s that State ownership that confuses a lot of foreigners as they automatically associate it with the BBC. Whereas a lot of UK people think it’s a private company like ITV, as it has adverts.
Does anybody else wonder about this guy’s credibility as regards his own involvement? Not so much the data still existing; that appears to have been confirmed by Facebook. But when he’s asked if he deleted the data, his original answer is “I signed a form,” before he actually says he did it…and then claims 'You guys are looking in the wrong place" when he’s pressed on it. I smell CYA to high heaven.
On the radio today the example was that, while targeted advertising and fake news would not make many people switch sides, sending fake video clips of Hillary making racist statements to black people in a swing state, might have persuaded them not to vote at all.
OK, I may be a cynic but I just assumed that if you had a Facebook profile you should expect to get targeted ads and information including targeted political ads. Sure they got the data by deception but if your Facebook is public they can get it anyway. That said, I’m pretty sure that their actions were unethical if not outright illegal. I am wondering how they coordinated with Parscale who was apparently running Trump’s digital campaign and is now in charge of the re-election campaign.
Maybe we frequent different sites, but I don’t recall ever seeing “What is your Porn Star name?” as a security question on any site’s I’ve been to.
No, but the way to come up with your porn name, “first pet” and “mother’s maiden name” are things that are sometimes asked as security questions.
Is this question for real?
Having seen the video expose of CA, I don’t get the “bribery and blackmail” angle at all. If you watch the video it seems pretty clear that CA is not saying that they are going to bribe or blackmail anyone. They say that they can expose corrupt politicians (from the “other side”, of course) by secretly offering them bribes (or Ukranian hookers) which they can then release and thus undermine the other candidates.
The ironic thing is that they were caught saying this to a media entity which was in the process of doing this exact same thing to them - entrapping them and using secret cameras to record their reactions and then expose them. But if you’re OK with this media doing it, then I don’t see why it suddenly becomes nefarious and evil when CA does the exact same thing.
The only thing that looked bad to me from the video I saw was the CA guy saying that the truth didn’t matter and it’s all about emotion. But this is heavily dependent on the context in which he said it, which was not provided. That could be bad (if he suggested CA would knowingly spread lies) or completely benign (if he was just saying that focusing on the truth of your own message was insufficient because it wouldn’t be effective).
Offering bribes to public officials is a crime, even if you try to claim that you were just doing it out of the goodness of your heart and your deep, deep, respect for the democratic process.
Of course, in the tapes, Nix and his colleagues claim to be doing it to influence elections, so their subsequent attempts to pretend that it was an act of public service ring a bit hollow.
Zuckerberg on CNN tonight at 9 eastern