Cambridge Analytica sought to use Facebook data to predict partisanship for voter targeting
The UK’s data watchdog has sent a letter to parliament in lieu of a final report on a wide-ranging investigation into online political advertising which saw it raid the offices of Cambridge Analytica in 2018 after it emerged that the disgraced (and now defunct) data company had improperly acquired data on millions of Facebook users.
The investigation confirmed Cambridge Analytica applied AI techniques to the data to try to predict partisanship or other significant attributes of voters for the purpose of more effectively targeting them with political messaging. Although it says it was unable to confirm whether such techniques were used in specific campaigns.
