In the early 2010s, Cambridge Analytica, a British political consulting firm linked to SCL Group, exploited Facebook’s Open Graph platform to amass personal data on tens of millions of users without informed consent. Aleksandr Kogan’s 2013 app, “This Is Your Digital Life,” paid several hundred thousand users to take a personality quiz ostensibly for academic research. Facebook’s rules at the time allowed the app to harvest not just respondents’ data, but also that of their friends, ultimately capturing information on up to 87 million profiles. Cambridge Analytica used this trove to build psychographic profiles—detailed psychological portraits—of voters and deployed them for micro‑targeted political advertising, notably in Ted Cruz’s and Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaigns. The firm was also accused of work around Brexit and of manipulating turnout in Trinidad and Tobago’s elections.
Journalistic investigations culminated in 2018 when former employee Christopher Wylie went public as a whistleblower, prompting simultaneous exposés in The Guardian and The New York Times. Facebook lost over $100 billion in market value in days, Mark Zuckerberg was hauled before the U.S. Congress, and regulators worldwide launched probes. The UK Information Commissioner fined Facebook and investigated Cambridge Analytica’s global operations and possible Russian links; the U.S. Federal Trade Commission later levied a record $5 billion fine and imposed a 20‑year privacy order. Cambridge Analytica filed for bankruptcy, though successor entities emerged. Public outrage fueled hashtags like #DeleteFacebook and #OwnYourData, while documentaries such as Netflix’s The Great Hack turned the scandal into a cultural touchstone in the ongoing struggle over data, power, and democracy.