Cambridge Analytica a year on: 'a lesson in institutional failure'

Source: The Guardian

Cambridge Analytica a year on: ‘a lesson in institutional failure’

One year after she broke the scandal, Carole Cadwalladr talks to whistleblower Christopher Wylie about the fallout for big tech, and the fight to hold the culprits to account

Sun 17 Mar 2019 08.00 GMT

It’s a measure of how much has changed in a year that, last month the UK, parliament published an official report that called Facebook “digital gangsters” and said that Britain’s electoral laws no longer worked. It was a report that drew on hours of testimony from Cambridge Analytica directors, Facebook executives and dozens of expert witnesses: 73 in total, of whom MPs had asked 4,350 questions. And its conclusion? That Silicon Valley’s tech platforms were out of control, none more so than Facebook, which it said had treated parliament with “contempt”.

And it’s a measure of how much hasn’t changed that this was a news story for just two hours on a Monday morning before the next Westminster drama – the launch of the Independent Group – knocked it off the headline slots.

It was a year ago this weekend that the Observer published the first in a series of stories, known as the Cambridge Analytica Files, that led to parliament grappling with these questions. The account of a whistleblower from inside the data analytics firm that had worked in different capacities – the details are still disputed – on the two pivotal campaigns of 2016 that gave us Brexit and Trump.

Christopher Wylie, a 28-year-old Canadian and former research director at Cambridge Analytica, revealed how the company had exploited Facebook data harvested from millions of people across the world to profile and target them with political messages and misinformation, without their knowledge or consent.

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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/mar/17/cambridge-analytica-year-on-lesson-in-institutional-failure-christopher-wylie