Photo courtesy:  Dreaming Andy – Fotolia

In the 2016 United States Presidential election, we saw an unprecedented number of social media ads, specifically Facebook ads, being paid for in favor of then-republican nominee Donald J. Trump, and directly and negatively targeting then-democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. The Trump campaign hired UK-based data research company Cambridge Analytica to scrape thousands of individualized data points from millions of Facebook users, analyze it, create profiles for each individual and then determine if they were “persuadables” (voters who were undecided on which candidate to vote for). One of the employees at Cambridge Analytica was Brittany Kaiser, a former volunteer (who was in high school at the time) on Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign, who ran his Facebook page. Kaiser became Cambridge Analytica’s Director of Business Development from 2015 to 2018 and worked extensively on Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. Kaiser and others at Cambridge Analytica used the millions of data points they gathered from American Facebook users to directly target them with ads to persuade them to vote for Trump, without their knowledge, consent or agreement.  

Associate Professor of Media Design at Parsons School of Design in New York, David Carroll wondered about his personal data that Cambridge Analytica had scraped from him during Trump’s campaign and how they used it. Carroll went so far as to sue Cambridge Analytica for his data in a U.K. lawsuit to “establish the principle that companies cannot use personal data in any way they see fit.” The lawsuit explains how Cambridge Analytica deliberately swung the vote in favor of Trump with the following methodology:  

“The business involved the acquisition of commercial data from multiple vendors, its amalgamation and analysis (including “psychographic profiling” using models developed by academics at the University of Cambridge), and the use of the product of that analysis to facilitate targeted advertising and messaging (“micro-targeting”) for clients. Amongst those clients were political parties and campaign groups who used the services of Cambridge Analytica to seek to influence voting behaviour.” 

During the 2016 campaign, Cambridge Analytica provided their harvested data for Trump’s campaign to buy 5.9 million Facebook ads targeting “persuadables” in the United States. Compare this to the mere 66,000 ads the Clinton campaign spent money on, and you can see a direct correlation between the money spent on Trump’s Facebook ads to the 80,000 votes for him in just three states. “The most important states, though, were Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Trump won those states by 0.2, 0.7 and 0.8 percentage points, respectively — and by 10,704, 46,765 and 22,177 votes. Those three wins gave him 46 electoral votes; if Clinton had done one point better in each state, she’d have won the electoral vote, too.”  

The way Cambridge Analytica knowingly mined the data of millions of U.S. voters to swing the 2016 election in favor of Donald Trump was criminal. It severely showcased a flaw in American government in that no federal law was in place to stop this horrific and scandalous act. If Carroll had not sued Cambridge Analytica in a U.K. court for the rights to his own data and shined a light on this horrific practice, they might have gotten away with it.  

Kaiser’s role as a whistleblower against Cambridge Analytica, “exposing the abuses of data in elections around the world by testifying before the U.K. parliamentary investigation and releasing documents that would expose Cambridge Analytica’s activities to the public,” helped bring them down and shut their doors.  

Netflix’s documentary The Great Hack, takes a deep dive into the nuances of the 2016 election and how Cambridge Analytica was easily able to run roughshod over American voters to elect one of the most controversial and polarizing presidents in modern history. It shows us exactly how our data is being used and abused without our knowledge or ability to opt-out. When I watched this documentary after class this week, it made me more passionate about helping the conversation around data privacy.  

According to the U.S. State Privacy Legislation Tracker 2024, 13 states have signed consumer privacy bills into law. However, it should not be up to each state to enact and enforce varying privacy laws for all United States citizens. It is high time the United States Federal Government held agencies like Cambridge Analytica accountable for their role in illegally harvesting data. Across the pond within the European Union, they see it as consumer-owned and protected. “Under the broader “rights-based” approach exemplified by the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), individuals effectively own their personal information and thus presumptively have the legal right to control it, and who can use it is a matter for them to decide.” The United States government needs to enact a federal consumer data privacy law and heavily regulate how companies handle our private data to give the American people complete control as to who sees, uses and controls their personal information.  

Sources  

Bellamy, F. (January 12, 2023) U.S. data privacy laws to enter new era in 2023. Reuters.https://www.reuters.com/legal/legalindustry/us-data-privacy-laws-enter-new-era-2023-2023-01-12/  

Bump, P. (December 1, 2016). Donald Trump will be president thanks to 80,000 people in three states. The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/12/01/donald-trump-will-be-president-thanks-to-80000-people-in-three-states/  
 
Kenigsberg, B. (July 23, 2019). ‘The Great Hack’ Review: How Your Data Became a Commodity, A new documentary examines the ramifications when private companies harvest online information about us. New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/23/movies/the-great-hack-review.html 
 
Kos, P., Barnett, E., Amer, K. (2019). The Great Hack. Netflix. https://www.netflix.com/title/80117542  

n/a. (2024). US State Privacy Legislation Tracker 2024, Comprehensive Consumer Privacy Bills. iapp. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_iKqn8YkcU46V5AmmglGidQ-2q6KI9JS/view?usp=drive_link
 
n/a. (July 17, 2020). Whistleblower and Data Rights Activist Brittany Kaiser Joins Brock Pierce for President as Campaign Manager. Brock Pierce for President. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/whistleblower-and-data-rights-activist-brittany-kaiser-joins-brock-pierce-for-president-as-campaign-manager-301095331.html  

n/a. (n/d). Faculty David Carroll Associate Professor of Media Design. The New School. https://www.newschool.edu/parsons/faculty/David-Carroll/  
 
Rosenberg, M., Roose, K. (October 20, 2019). Trump Campaign Floods Web With Ads, Raking In Cash as Democrats Struggle. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/20/us/elections/trump-campaign-ads-democrats.html  

Vincent John Green (2) Mark Newman Petitioners (as joint Administrators of each of the Respondent Companies) vs. (1) SCL Group Limited Respondents (2) SCL Analytics Limited (3) SCL Commercial Limited (4) SCL Social Limited (5) SCL Elections Limited (6) Cambridge Analytica (UK) Limited. EWHC 954 (Ch) Case No: CR-2018-006683, CR-2018-006687, CR-2018-006713, CR-2018-006709, CR-2018-006701, CR-2018-006696. (2019). ewhc_ch_2019_954.pdf