In December 2015, the Guardian revealed that Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign was using psychological profiles based on data harvested from tens of millions of Facebook users. The organisation that assembled the data was at the time described as a “little-known data company” called Cambridge Analytica, a name now synonymous with efforts to use Facebook data to try and influence election outcomes worldwide.
This week, Cambridge Analytica announced that it, along with SCL Elections, the UK entity owned by the former CEO Alexander Nix, was shutting down over mounting legal fees and what it described as a “siege of media coverage” that drove away “virtually all of the company’s customers and suppliers”. The company – which was created with an initial $15m investment from the hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer – maintains it has done nothing wrong and has been killed by negative PR. No announcement has been made about the fate of the parent company, SCL Group, a UK defence contractor which has been in business for 30 years.
The beginning of the end for the data analytics firm was on Saturday 17 March, when the Observer and the New York Times published interviews with the whistleblower Christopher Wylie.
This followed more than a year’s worth of reporting on the company by the Observer. The first piece, in February last year, triggered two legal investigations, both of which are continuing: one by the Electoral Commission into what work the company did for Nigel Farage’s Leave.EU campaign and whether it had been properly declared, and the other by the Information Commissioner’s Office, which also announced a wider inquiry into the use of data in politics.
Wylie detailed how the software program at the heart of Cambridge Analytica was created, and how the company collected the data of tens of millions of Facebook users for commercial use, in violation of the social media giant’s own rules.
“We exploited Facebook to harvest millions of people’s profiles. And built models to exploit what we knew about them and target their inner demons. That was the basis the entire company was built on,” he said.
By late 2015, Facebook found out that information had been harvested on an unprecedented scale, but at the time it failed to alert users and took only limited steps to recover and secure the private information of more than 50 million individuals.
Cambridge Analytica went on to work for Donald Trump’s campaign, and its executives would later claim to undercover reporters that the company played a pivotal role in his victory.
Facebook attempted to dampen the impact of Wylie’s whistleblowing interviews by publishing its own mea culpa and banning Cambridge Analytica and SCL Group from its platform, hours before publication but two years after the data breach was first reported.
It argued it had asked Cambridge Analytica to delete the Facebook data after the Guardian’s 2015 article and had taken the company’s word when it said it had done this.
When the stories came out they prompted international outrage, and made Cambridge Analytica an unlikely household name. And so started six weeks of pain for the firm.
The day after Wylie’s bombshell revelations, US congressional investigators from the house intelligence committee asked Cambridge Analytica’s CEO, Nix, to testify before Congress. They also summoned Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, to explain the data breach.
On Monday 19 March, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), the UK’s data watchdog, requested a warrant to search Cambridge Analytica’s servers and ordered Facebook’s “digital forensics team”, which had gone to its offices to secure evidence, to stand down, arguing that a Facebook audit could potentially compromise a regulatory investigation.
That evening the UK’s Channel 4 News broadcast secret recordings in which Nix boasted of using honey traps, fake news campaigns and operations with former spies to swing election campaigns around the world.
The following day, Nix was suspended from the company. A second undercover report showed Cambridge Analytica executives boasted of playing a key role in bringing Trump to power, and claiming they used “unattributable and untrackable” advertising to support their clients in elections.
“We did all the research, all the data, all the analytics, all the targeting. We ran all the digital campaign, the television campaign and our data informed all the strategy,” Nix told an undercover reporter when asked about Trump’s campaign.
On Friday 23 March, after a wait for the warrant, 18 investigators from the ICO spent seven hours searching Cambridge Analytica’s London offices.
A second former Cambridge Analytica employee, Brittany Kaiser, also went on the record to reveal further details of the company’s inner workings to the Guardian.
On Sunday 25 March, Wylie spoke about Cambridge Analytica connections to AggregateIQ, a Canadian firm that worked with different leave campaigns in the European referendum.
Soon afterwards, US watchdogs filed a legal complaint against Cambridge Analytica with the Federal Election Commission.
They accused the company of potentially violating US election law, by employing non-American citizens to work on American election campaigns, despite receiving a legal warning about the risks.
With anger mounting about Facebook’s silence, and 10 days after the initial reports were published, Zuckerberg agreed to testify to the US Congress about the data breach. He has refused repeated requests from the UK’s parliament to answer questions, and MPs are now threatening him with summons if he does not come voluntarily to testify.
Meanwhile, Wylie began hours of testimony to a UK parliamentary select committee, in which he claimed Cambridge Analytica sought to disrupt elections around the world, including distributing violent videos in Nigeria.
He also alleged there was coordination in the Brexit campaign between Vote Leave and BeLeave, bringing into question the legitimacy of a £625,000 donation which was received by AggregateIQ.
Vote Leave has repeatedly denied coordination between the campaigns and said the donation was legitimate under election law.
Facebook suspended AggregateIQ, a data firm with which the Vote Leave campaign spent 40% of its budget, on 6 April, following reports that it was connected to SCL.
AggregateIQ has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing. It maintains it is 100% Canadian owned and operated, and not a direct part or branch of Cambridge Analytica. Jeff Silvester, founder of AggregateIQ, said that Cambridge Analytica was not in contact with the company during the referendum campaign. “AIQ never worked or even communicated in any way with Cambridge Analytica or any other parties related to Cambridge Analytica with respect to the Brexit campaign,” he said. “Any claim that we shared Vote Leave data with Cambridge Analytica or anyone else in any way is entirely false.”
By 10 April, British and US lawyers had launched a joint class action against Facebook, Cambridge Analytica and SCL for allegedly misusing the personal data of more than 71 million people. The lawsuit claims the firms obtained users’ private information from the social network to develop “political propaganda campaigns” in the UK and the US.
That same week, Zuckerberg faced 10 hours of questioning by members of Congress. He remained calm and composed, showing remorse and deference and highlighting the changes Facebook had already made. He pledged to do more to protect privacy and prevent foreign interference in elections.
Nix was summoned to appear before a British parliamentary committee on fake news the following week for questioning over “inconsistencies” in evidence he had given the committee in February, when he claimed: “We do not work with Facebook data, and we do not have Facebook data.” However, on 17 April he cancelled his appearance, citing the ICO’s ongoing investigation into his company.
Damian Collins, the chair of the digital, culture, media and sport committee said: “We do not accept Mr Nix’s reason for not appearing in a public session before the committee.
“There is … no legal reason why Mr Nix cannot appear.”
Cambridge Analytica held a press conference on Tuesday 24 April, in which it stated that the data it licensed from the academic Aleksandr Kogan’s company Global Science Research was “ineffectual” and therefore it did not use it in Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.
Spokesman Clarence Mitchell said the company tested to see if Kogan’s personality types could improve the performance of advertising campaigns but that that they “underperformed when compared to more traditional ways of grouping people by demographics”.
The damage was already done. Cambridge Analytica’s clients and suppliers had, the company said, jumped ship after the firm was “vilified for activities that are not only legal, but also widely accepted as a standard component of online advertising in both the political and commercial arenas”.
On 2 May, the same day that Cambridge Analytica announced it was going into liquidation, Chris Vickery of the data security firm Upguard gave evidence to the digital, culture, media and sport committee that the Trump campaign had access to psychological profiles derived from Facebook data, that AIQ and Cambridge Analytica were technologically entwined and that illegal co-ordination of data by leave campaigns was “indisputable”.
Although Cambridge Analytica might be dead, the team behind it has already set up a new company called Emerdata. According to Companies House data, Nix is listed as a director along with other executives from SCL Group.
