The whistleblower who revealed that Cambridge Analyica harvested data on 50million Facebook users to target campaign ads has spoken out on television.
Christopher Wylie, 28, said that he’s ‘taking responsibility’ and ‘owning up’ to his role with Cambridge Analytica, in a new interview with CBS News released late on Monday.
Wylie is a data scientist whose ideas helped the firm backed by Steve Bannon and billionaire Robert Mercer create psychological profiles and targeted Facebook ads for the presidential election campaigns of Ted Cruz and Donald Trump.
‘All of these pieces of information, put together, create a digital portrait of who you are,’ Wylie said.
Wylie, a self-described ‘gay Canadian vegan’, spoke out in a TV interview about his role helping the firm backed by Steve Bannon and billionaire Robert Mercer
Cambridge Analytica bought the data from a company that had made a ‘personality quiz’ app that gathered profile data on users and their friends on Facebook.
‘It scaled really quickly. We spent over $1 million on it, so it wasn’t cheap but in terms of the amount of data that was collected, and the quality of that data, it was a rare example of where something was fast, relatively cheap, but high-quality, ‘ Wylie said.
Wylie, a self-described ‘gay Canadian vegan’, has spoken out widely since handing over information to the Guardian for an explosive report that broke over the weekend.
‘I take a share of responsibility in this because I was the research director and I worked on this program so I’m going to start by saying I’m taking responsibility and I’m owning up,’ Wylie said in the new TV interview.
‘In terms of who else needs to take responsibility: Cambridge Analytica — it funded the program, it approved the program – as an entity this is what ultimately became the foundation of what Cambridge Analytica is,’ he said.
‘I take a share of responsibility in this because I was the research director and I worked on this program so I’m going to start by saying I’m taking responsibility and I’m owning up,’ Wylie said
Facebook said that the company that created the Facebook quiz gathered user data legally under their terms of service, but the sale of that data to a third party was a violation of terms
Wylie added: ‘Last week I offered to help Facebook and work with Facebook and their lawyers confirmed that they wanted to work in a collaborative manner — when all of this came out I got banned [from Facebook] — they decided that actually the whistleblower is the person they want to apparently go after.’
Facebook said that the company that created the Facebook quiz gathered user data legally under their terms of service, but that the sale of that data to a third party was a violation of those terms.
The social network suspended the companies involved.
Wylie called the data a ‘political gold mine.’
‘If you’re trying to influence an American election, that’s a one-stop shop,’ Wylie said.
No profile information involved in the controversy was hacked or stolen, said Facebook.
‘People knowingly provided their information, no systems were infiltrated, and no passwords or sensitive pieces of information were stolen or hacked,’ Facebook said in a statement.