It has been nearly two years since the Cambridge Analytica scandal rocked civil society, leaving politicians and average citizens reeling over the exposed illicit use of personal data in electoral campaigns. Today, Christopher Wylie — the ex-Cambridge Analytica employee who exposed the impropriety — is warning that the practice remains a major threat. "This is a new facet of elections in the 21st century," said Wylie, whose new memoir, *Mindf-ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America*, details the scandal that percolated through the 2016 election of President Trump.
The Cambridge Analytica scandal, which was largely uncovered in early 2018, centered around the London-based company's practice of using false pretenses to harvest personal information from millions of U.S. voters' Facebook accounts. The company was first employed by the 2016 campaign of Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and later used by the Trump team. With the mined data, the campaigns could essentially deploy highly targeted political ads to likely and on-the-fence voters.
"Facebook, because of its loose permissioning oversight at the time, actually authorized an application to harvest all of the data — tens of millions of American's private records," Wiley explained.
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