For the 2012 election Obama and Google built such a classifier for US voters using Facebook user data. The Guardian gushed about it and quoted CampaignGrid's CEO Jeff Dittus "I'm sure this is the future of digital political campaigning."
Eric Schmidt's daughter, Sophie Schmidt, interned at SCL Group, the parent company of Cambridge Analytica, and suggested that the company work with Palantir, a data-mining firm co-founded by Peter Thiel [2][3]. This connection was revealed in a 2013 email, where an SCL employee mentioned Sophie's recommendation [3].
The idea of creating a personality-quiz app to harvest data from Facebook was suggested by Alfredas Chmieliauskas, a business-development staffer at Palantir in London [2][3].
Cambridge Analytica later developed a relationship with a Palantir staffer, which led to the development of their data harvesting methods [2]. Whistleblower Christopher Wylie, who befriended Sophie, claimed that senior Palantir employees worked on the Facebook profile data acquired by Cambridge Analytica, although this was not an official contract between the two companies [1].
Cambridge Analytica's harvested data was later used in political campaigns, including the 2016 Trump campaign.
Somehow by then, it was the worst scandal in campaigning since the dawn of time.
For the 2012 election Obama and Google built such a classifier for US voters using Facebook user data. The Guardian gushed about it and quoted CampaignGrid's CEO Jeff Dittus "I'm sure this is the future of digital political campaigning."
https://archive.ph/QnIhk
Eric Schmidt's daughter, Sophie Schmidt, interned at SCL Group, the parent company of Cambridge Analytica, and suggested that the company work with Palantir, a data-mining firm co-founded by Peter Thiel [2][3]. This connection was revealed in a 2013 email, where an SCL employee mentioned Sophie's recommendation [3].
The idea of creating a personality-quiz app to harvest data from Facebook was suggested by Alfredas Chmieliauskas, a business-development staffer at Palantir in London [2][3].
Cambridge Analytica later developed a relationship with a Palantir staffer, which led to the development of their data harvesting methods [2]. Whistleblower Christopher Wylie, who befriended Sophie, claimed that senior Palantir employees worked on the Facebook profile data acquired by Cambridge Analytica, although this was not an official contract between the two companies [1].
Cambridge Analytica's harvested data was later used in political campaigns, including the 2016 Trump campaign.
Somehow by then, it was the worst scandal in campaigning since the dawn of time.
Citations:
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/27/palantir-worked-with-cambridge-analytica-on-the-facebook-data-whistleblower.html
[2] https://www.businessinsider.com/emails-peter-thiel-palantir-facebook-cambridge-analytica-2018-3
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/27/us/cambridge-analytica-palantir.html
[4] https://www.thecanary.co/global/world-analysis/2018/05/09/if-you-thought-cambridge-analytica-was-scary-well-this-lots-fcking-terrifying/
[5] https://www.tomshardware.com/news/palantir-cambridge-analytica-facebook-data,36762.html