Cambridge Analytica (CA) is a consulting firm which deals with data analytics and political strategy consulting. This was set up in 2014 with the help of the former chief strategist of United states President Donald Trump and former head of alt-right media platform Mr. Steve Banon.
28 year old former employee of the company, Chris Wylie has revealed the details of the company to Journalist Carole Cadwalladr in an expose which is published in Observer newspaper last week.
According to Mr. Wylie, the Data acquired by CA is from the personality profiling app this is yourdigitallife which is built by Aleksandr Kogan, he academic at Cambridge University. This app is downloaded by 2,70,000 facebook users and has pulled the data from other Facebook users allowing CA to insert the data of 50 million users.
Things are getting worse for CA as the social media platform consequently deleted this app and asked Mr. Kogan to certify that the data was destroyed.
CA is being invesgitaed by the U.K.`s Electoral Commission for its role based on the previous reports about its dubious methods.