Politicians in Congress and Parliament are demanding Facebook testify as to how a conservative political data firm with ties to Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign collected profiles from more than 50 million unsuspecting Facebook users to target voters during the presidential election.
According to The New York Times and The Observer, Cambridge Analytica, which was founded by former Trump senior adviser and Breitbart chairman Steve Bannon and conservative donor Robert Mercer, was able to gather data from millions of Facebook profiles without their consent or notification. The firm claimed it could use “psychographic modeling” from that data that allowed it to identify the personalities of individual voters and influence their behavior.