type: timeline_event Christopher Wylie reveals Cambridge Analytica harvested 87 million Facebook profiles without consent for political manipulation, triggering global privacy crisis
On March 17, 2018, The Guardian and The New York Times simultaneously published explosive investigations based on documents provided by whistleblower Christopher Wylie, a former Cambridge Analytica research director. The reporting revealed that Cambridge Analytica, funded by Republican megadonor Robert Mercer and co-founded by Steve Bannon, had harvested the Facebook profiles of approximately 87 million users without their knowledge or consent. The data was collected through an app called "This Is Your Digital Life," developed by researcher Aleksandr Kogan, which exploited Facebook's Open Graph API to vacuum up not just survey respondents' data but also data from their entire social networks.
Cambridge Analytica used the harvested data to build detailed psychological profiles of American voters, which were then used for targeted political advertising in the 2016 Trump campaign and the Brexit referendum. The firm's psychographic targeting methods identified persuadable voters and served them tailored messaging designed to reinforce existing anxieties and prejudices. Wylie described the operation as building an "insurgency" by identifying vulnerable people and using digital tools to shape their political views. Facebook had been aware of the data breach since 2015 but failed to notify users or take meaningful corrective action.
The scandal triggered a catastrophic market response, with over $100 billion wiped from Facebook's market capitalization in days. Mark Zuckerberg was called before congressional committees in the United States and before Parliament in the United Kingdom. Cambridge Analytica shut down operations in May 2018 under the weight of regulatory investigations. The episode established foundational public awareness of surveillance capitalism's political dimensions and the potential for mass psychological manipulation through social media data.