Cambridge Analytica: Mavericks or industry representatives?

The recent scandal surrounding the allegations that Cambridge Analytica used data harvested from Facebook users, matching it with answers to a personality questionnaire casts a spotlight on one aspect of an increasingly common practice, writes Mike Thelwall, Professor of Information Science.

Marketing campaigns, customer relations managers and political campaigns have turned to social media for information about potential customers and voters. By harvesting informal posts to the social web on a large scale they have a quick and relatively cheap source of real-time feedback about what people think and how they react to marketing campaigns or news events. It has become normal for businesses and campaigns to get insights into their target audiences in this way. This is possible because the terms of service in many social web sites allow some or all their activities to be reused or sold.

At the individual level, marketers indirectly exploit personal information in social network sites to target advertisements at people that might be most receptive to them. For example, they can specify that an advert should be shown to females 20-30 and then the network owner will check its users’ details and send the advertisements to those matching the profile. For this, the advertiser does not need to be told the identity of those receiving the adverts and so their personal information is not being given away.

Cambridge Analytica’s alleged matching of personality questionnaire data with Facebook profile information would have given them deeper insights into users and allowed messages to be targeted by personality rather than just demographics. Facebook is taking steps to prevent this from being possible in the future.