Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America

by Christopher Wylie

They told me, essentially, that Facebook simply let them take it, through apps the professors had created. Facebook wants people to do research on its platform. The more it learns about its users, the more it can monetize them. It became clear when they explained how they collected data that Facebook’s permissions and controls were incredibly lax. When a person used their app, Stillwell and Kosinski could receive not only that person’s Facebook data, but the data of all of their friends as well. Facebook did not require express consent for apps to collect data from an app user’s friends, as it viewed being a user of Facebook as enough consent to take their data—even if the friends had no idea the app was harvesting their private data. The average Facebook user has somewhere between 150 and 300 friends. My mind turned to Bannon and Mercer, as I knew they would love this idea—and Nix would simply love that they loved it. “Let me get this straight,” I said. “If I create a Facebook app, and a thousand people use it, I’ll get…like 150,000 profiles? Really? Facebook actually lets you do that?” That’s right, they said. And if a couple million people downloaded the app, then we’d get 300 million profiles, minus the overlapping mutual friends. This would be an astonishingly huge data set. Up to that point, the largest data set I had worked on was Trinidad, which I thought was quite large, with profiles of one million people. But this set was on an entirely different level. In other...