I am sure a lot of us have heard about Cambridge Analytica and to be sincere, this particular name has sparked a lot of controversy around the world following Facebook’s data leak on how the company has used users Data to affect elections and decisions in several countries.
Who is behind Cambridge Analytica?
Nigel Oakes seems to be really not mentioned with this company but he is the backbone of the company. Being the CEO of Strategic Communication Laboratories (SCL). Born into a modest British family, he was schooled by his parents and went to Eton College, a school for the British elite. His first appearance came when he was said to be in a relationship with Lady Helen Windsor but was later arrested for crashing the Lady’s birthday party and was fined.
Nigel Oakes started working in an advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi in 1987 as a senior producer. The agency had political connections and at such was responsible for most political advertisement in Britain. Soon Nigel left the company and fell in love with psychology after which he hired Adrian Furnham and Barrie Gunter to help him as he opened his first company the Behavioral Dynamic Institute but the company’s website went down on the 22nd of March 2018.
Nigel Didn’t stop there, his passion for psychology pushed him to open Marketing Aromatics in 1992, with a goal of influencing behavior through smell but since this niche was very small and not really sought for, the company was shut down.
In 1993, Nigel Oakes decided to create another company known as the Strategic Communication Laboratories (SCL) with the aim of using data to affect government elections and governing. The company created a lot of controversy while trying to change a lot of governing methods through elections in countries like Indonesia, South Africa, Bangkok, Nigeria, Saint Lucia, Antigua and Barbuda, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Trinidad and Tobago, and many more country.
In 2003, Alexander Nix, a student of Eton college joined the company and moved through the ladder until he became a director in 2007. He brought up the idea of dealing with Europe and US government more instead of dealing with developing countries. In 2013, Nigel hired Christopher Wylie who was a data genius and programmer. With Cristopher and a team of programmer, Strategic Communication Laboratories (SCL) now had a good program to work on the United States and Europe. The Program was called Ripon and registered under the company Aggregate IQ. Aggregate IQ became a data marketing company interested in political elections.
How do they do this?
Aggregate IQ holds data of voters from the voting history, demography, party Affiliation, Voter’s magazine subscription, Credit Score and many more. They use this data to create specific Ads for supported candidates. They get this data from both public and private sources and they pay for a lot of them, one is Facebook data of 87 million users which was bought for $0.016 per user summing up to $1.4 million, with the false claim it was for Academic purposes. Steve Bannon and Robert Mercer decided to invest $5 million into Ripon under a subsidiary known as Cambridge Analytical. In other to get the company going, Robert will donate to a campaign so they will hire Cambridge analytical.
Using people’s data to target choices and affect decision isn’t a new thing as companies like Amazon, Google, Facebook, Microsoft and other do but the unethical aspect of it is selling people’s data for monetary purposes and for the purpose of psychologically changing people’s choices towards what is shared.
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