In March, The New York Times, working with The Observer of London and The Guardian, obtained a cache of documents from inside Cambridge Analytica, the data firm principally owned by the right-wing donor Robert Mercer. The documents proved that the firm, where the former Trump aide Stephen K. Bannon
was a board member, used data improperly obtained from Facebook to
build voter profiles. The news put Cambridge under investigation and
thrust Facebook into its biggest crisis ever. Here’s a guide to our
coverage.
March 17
Harvesting data and testing election law
The Times reported that in 2014 contractors and employees
of Cambridge Analytica, eager to sell psychological profiles of
American voters to political campaigns, acquired the private Facebook
data of tens of millions of users — the largest known leak in Facebook history.
There
was more. Our article first showed how Cambridge received warnings from
its own lawyer, Laurence Levy, as it employed European and Canadian
citizens on campaigns, potentially violating American election law. The
Times also found that tranches of raw data still existed beyond
Facebook’s control.
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