I had the wrong ending wrong................even that will be thrown back in my face...........Cambridge Analytica..................not Analytics.........


In early March of 2018, a U.K. based newspaper called The Observer reported that a “political consultancy” known as Cambridge Analytica had been provided access to the “personal data” of approximately 50 million Americans by Facebook. On March 21, 2018 Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg issued the company’s first public statement since this information was publicly disclosed. However, another article was published on April 4th by Wired that reports a statement made by Facebook regarding the number of people affected. Mike Schroepfer - Facebook’s chief technology officer - disclosed that the amount is closer to 87 million via a blog post.^[397] The earlier announcement discussed modification to the way that “third-party applications” could access data from Facebook.^[398] An app downloaded by 270,000 people has been claimed to have led to the crisis. When users downloaded this app – called “thisisyourdigitallife” – information regarding the users’ preferred Facebook content as well as their “home town” could then be accessed by the app. This was than used to acquire similar information of the user’s contacts and continued to affect approximately 50 million people in total.^[399] It has also been claimed that pre-existing policies around access to personal information of Facebook users by “third-party app developers” are foundational to the “crisis”.^[400] The company has received significant backlash following the disclosure of the use of private data by other entities. This backlash has also taken the form of demands for legal accountability, including the opening of an investigation into the company by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission.^[401] Others such as Elon Musk, who has deleted his Facebook pages for SpaceX and Tesla, have publicly expressed their decision to terminate their use of the media platform for their purposes.^[402]