Pink-haired whistleblower at heart of Facebook scandal

Editor: Johnathan Meyers | Tactical Investor

Instantly recognisable with his pink hair and nose ring, Christopher Wylie claims to have helped create data analysis company Cambridge Analytica before turning whistleblower and becoming “the face” of the crisis engulfing Facebook.

Carole Cadwalladr, the Guardian journalist who worked with Wylie for a year on the story, described him as “clever, funny, bitchy, profound, intellectually ravenous, compelling. A master storyteller. A politicker. A data science nerd.”

The bespectacled 28-year-old describes himself as “the gay Canadian vegan who somehow ended up creating Steve Bannon’s psychological warfare tool,” referring to Trump’s former adviser, whom the report said had deep links with Cambridge Analytica (CA).

With Wylie’s help, Cadwalladr revealed how CA scooped up data from millions of Facebook users in the US.

They then used the information to build political and psychological profiles, in order to create targeted messages for voters.

Facebook insists it did not know the data taken from its site were being used, but the revelations have raised urgent questions over how data of 50 million users ended up in CA’s hands.

Shares of the tech giant have since tumbled, with $70 billion (56 billion euros) wiped off in 10 days.

Walter Mitt

Wylie studied law and then fashion, before entering the British political sphere when he landed a job working for the Liberal Democrats.

Former Lib Dem colleague Ben Rathe had a less complementary description of Wylie, tweeting that he “thinks he’s Edward Snowden, when he’s actually Walter Mitty”—a reference to a fictional character with a vivid fantasy life.

Wylie became a research director for Strategic Communication Laboratories (SCL), the parent company of CA, in 2014.

“I helped create that company,” he said of CA in an interview with several European newspapers.Full Story

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Why That Recent Abuse of Facebook Data Matters

This is, I hope, not a shock to you. In fact, it’s one of the biggest takeaways of the recent investigation involving Facebook and a data mining company called Cambridge Analytica.

The short version: Cambridge Analytica used a quiz app to scrape data such as users’ identities, their friend networks, and likes from millions of Facebook users. Users inadvertently gave consent by agreeing to the user conditions in the app. The company later used that data to build targeted political ads for Donald Trump’s political campaign, the New York Times, which conducted the investigation along with The Observer, reports.

But who’s to blame for such a massive breach of user privacy? Yes, it’s easy to point a well-deserved finger at Cambridge Analytica, and another at Facebook. But it’s too neat to pin it on those two when the problem is so much larger and insidious.

We spent $1m harvesting millions of Facebook profiles

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We all do this. When we download a new app or sign up for a social media site, we never read the user agreements. They’re boring and we’re impatient. But the truth is they have some pretty important information in them. We check “yes” on Terms of Service agreements, even though we know in the back of our minds the fine print might include an article that the network plans to sell our information. We could all stand to be more discerning before downloading apps and filling out quizzes.

Even more invasive was that Facebook’s terms of service allowed apps to access friends’ Facebook data as well as the user’s own (this was the case in 2014 and, Facebook has stated, has since changed). That means that any app that was using Facebook at the time could have accessed as much data as Cambridge Analytica did, though it’s not yet clear if other apps did so. Full Story

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Walter Mitt

Why That Recent Abuse of Facebook Data Matters

We spent $1m harvesting millions of Facebook profiles

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