Facebook and Google use your personal data to make money. Consumer data is the core of their advertising businesses. By making your private data accessible to third parties they have attained a combined market value of $1.2 trillion. Â Apple, on the other hand, does not sell or otherwise use your personal data. Â They make…
Back in 2014 start-up company Cambridge Analytica was looking for a way to obtain private Facebook data from tens of millions of American Facebook users. Â To accomplish this difficult task Cambridge Analytica got help from one or more employees at Palantir Technologies, a top Silicon Valley company which has done top-secret work for the NSA,…
Recently we reported how Cambridge Analytica had distributed their 27-page blueprint for using data to increase the effectiveness of political ads, such as the ones they claim helped Donald Trump get elected president.  Cambridge Analytica’s business development director Brittany Kaiser explained how the blueprint was created and also how it was used. According to Kaiser,…
Facebook’s legal troubles continue to grow in number and intensity. Over recent days we have reported that: Facebook is being sued in U.S. by its users over improper data harvesting, The FTC Opened an investigation into Facebook’s violation of a 2011 consent decree, and Facebook CEO Zuckerberg was invited to testify at a U.S. Senate hearing….
According to Bloomberg News Facebook has dropped nearly $100 billion in market value over the past 10 days, and is headed for its worst month in nearly six years. Â Its stock price was down over 6% Monday in early trading. And the bad news keeps on coming for the social media giant. The Federal Trade…
The Cambridge Analytica headquarters in London were raided by 18 law enforcement officers from the British Information Ministry on Friday evening after a judge granted a search warrant. According to news reports, the warrant and the British Information Commissioner, Elizabeth Denham, were “seeking access to records held by Cambridge Analytica which faces allegations it may…
Cambridge Analytica had a detailed 27-page blueprint for making Donald Trump victorious in the 2016 presidential election according to exclusive new reporting in The Guardian newspaper. The internal company document which was leaked by a high-level source from the company, explains how data was used to create 10,000 different ads that supported Trump. These ads were…
Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg issued a statement late Wednesday on the Cambridge Analytica data scandal which has embroiled his company in global controversies and seen a loss of up to $50 billion in market value. “We have a responsibility to protect your data, and if we can’t then we don’t deserve to serve you,” Zuckerberg said…
‘The Heat is On’ is a Glenn Frey song made famous by the 1980’s TV show ‘Miami Vice.’ Given all the news about how Facebook data was improperly used to manipulate hundreds of millions of people in elections, the song’s title is an apt description of the environment that the social media giant is currently…
Top executives of Cambridge Analytica (Cambridge) – the company that credits itself with helping Donald Trump win the presidency through its improper use of Facebook data  – have been secretly filmed boasting about how they could fix elections by entrapping political candidates. Their proposed techniques included using bribes and Ukrainian sex workers to put…
Everybody knows that Steve Bannon helped Donald Trump win the presidency, but very few people know how he did it. Â But now thanks to whistleblower Christopher Wylie, information has come out that shows how Bannon and others supporting the Trump campaign obtained data from over 50 million Facebook users without their express permission. Â This…