The Cambridge Analytica Scandal

at the moment. I got my cup of water with me, but I am recording this immediately after recording the previous two episodes of tech Stuff, So if I start getting particularly raspy, I apologize, but it's because my health is slowly failing. In our last episode, I talked about how two old Etonian's, first Nigel Oaks and later Alexander Nicks, formed a company that depended heavily on psychological information of questionable utility to form a consulting company that would take

that data and create action items for clients. They focused mainly on political clients, with Nix's push to focus more exclusively on elections, and I ended just as the organization they created, Strategic Communication Laboratories or SCL, had spun off, a new entity backed by American billionaires and This new entity was called Cambridge Analytica. That entity incorporated in Delaware on December thirty one, two thousand thirteen, so the very

last day of two thousand thirteen. Before incorporating, NIX had led a few attempts to get cozy with American politics, but things had not really gone well. The Republican candidate for governor of Virginia was Ken Cucinelli, and a political action committee supporting Cucinelli had hired SCL. Now remember this was this was before Cambridge Analytica had become an official thing. S c L was to post to create a list of voters who could be persuaded to support Cucinelli. That

was what they were contracted to do. But the deadline came and went and still no list, and eventually the political action committee, the pack cut ties with the firm, saying well, you're not delivering upon your promise, so we're not gonna do business anymore. But s c L had also worked with another PACK in Virginia, also supporting Cucinelli.

This one was called the Americans for Limited Government and they wanted SCL to provide the group with a list of women voters from suburban areas who traditionally would vote Democrat, but who were thought to possibly flip Republican. So s c L eventually produced a list of women and handed it over, But upon closer inspection it turned out that this was a list of Republican supporters, not flippable Democrats. So in other words, those people that already were kind

of promising to vote that way. So s c L and Knicks had not performed very well in two thousand thirteen, And if the mercers had learned about that, the billionaires who had backed decided to help form Cambridge Analytica, maybe they wouldn't have funded the founding of Cambridge an Analytica if they had known about those failures. Steve Bannon became a driving force behind the scenes at Cambridge Analytica. He's was the executive over at Bright Barton News at the time.

According to Chris Wiley, that's the data analyst who had UH first come on board in order to look into using data from various sources to support sc l's efforts, and was the one to recommend going towards using social media and apps similar to the one that that Stillwell had created back over at the University of Cambridge. UH He said that Bannon was really interested in using social media and messaging as a way to wage psychological warfare

to push a particular political philosophy. And in fact, to quote Wiley, he said, Cambrage Analytica was quote Bannon's arsenal of weaponry to wage a culture war on America using military strategies end quote. He said, Bannon was absolutely fascinated with the idea of using military tactics to wage a political war in in a campaign. The mercers meanwhile, use their leverage as wealthy go op backers to convince many different campaigns to actually go ahead and make use of

Cambridge Analytica. So, out of the eight federal level clients that Cambridge Analytica one in two thousand thirteen and two thousand and fourteen, the clients they landed out of all eight of them, all eight where received being financial backing from the mercers. So how about that. So, for example, in two thousand fourteen, Robert Mercer donated one million dollars to John Bolton's Superpack, and then that same superpack went and hired Cambridge Analytica for consulting work to the tune

of three dollars. Kind of odd they reviews of the work that Cambridge an Altica were returning. The reviews were not great, they weren't spectacular. Apart from one U S Senate race in North Carolina, that one was pretty positive about Cambridge an Analytica, but a lot of other reports were saying they aren't really delivering upon what they promised, but the hype continued. Nix was really really good at

selling an idea. Never mind that the idea did not really have a lot of solid foundation in academic scholarship or published scientific research, or or even proof that their efforts were effective in the field. He was still really selling it, and the company in began to test certain messages that would later show up in a future campaign. Now, this was during the mid term elections often, and the messages that they were testing out in different regions appeared

to be firmly rooted in Steve Bannon's philosophy. So these this is when we started seeing phrases like build a wall or drain the swamp. They're being tested at that time in fourteen among different Republican populations, messages that were critical of immigrants and ones that criticized big government would roll into rotation and test out, and the company also began testing the waters to see what the general opinion among Republican voters was about a certain Vladimir Putin, the

President of Russia. And this was all during those mid terms of fourteen years before they would be used in greater rollouts in twenty. In two thousand fifteen, Ted Ru's announced his candidacy for president, although that announcement did not go as planned. Uh So, his campaign, before they had announced that it was a campaign, had secured the services of Cambridge Analytica to design the campaign website, the official website for Ted Cruz running for president. It did not

start off great. So Ted Cruz sends out a tweet before midnight, uh the day before he's going to announce his candidacy, and it's a very teasing tweet. Everyone knew what it really meant because there were there's no shortage of uh pundits out there saying Ted Cruz was going to put his name in the ring for president, but the official announcement had not yet happened, and he said,

just wait, it's gonna come really soon. And what was supposed to happen was one minute after midnight, the official campaign website was supposed to launch, but his team couldn't get the website to park. They couldn't get it live. Once again, a product from Cambridge Analytica was not performing the way people expected. So several minutes after midnight, crews would announce his candidacy on Twitter. So so didn't get to share the link to the official campaign website. It

was not live yet. He just went ahead and announced on Twitter because the plan was not going according to plan. Uh. Initially a dozen Cambridge Analytica employees were on the staff with the Cruise campaign, but apparently the company consistently failed to deliver results and so that number was whittled down

to three. As the campaign continued, Cambridge Analytica broke down Cruises target audience into four categories temperamental people, relaxed leaders, timid traditionalists, and stoic traditionalists, and this was based off the data the company had gathered about those potential voters, and the company had also created suggested messaging for each group, saying well, this target group, this type of messaging will work most effectively, but for this other group, you want

to go with this different approach. And the whole idea was that they were targeting psychological anchor points that would give Cruizes campaign the advantage. Now Cruizes campaign made use of data that Cambridge General Nitteca had gathered using Alexander Cogan's Facebook app, the one that had retrieved information about users friends without those friends consent. And also this was

in violation of Facebook's policies. Facebook was told that it was going to be an academic research project and therefore the data was supposed to just stay with Cogan and not change hands. But that's not what happened. Cogan did essentially sell the data from his possession to Cambridge Analytica, so Ted Cruz making use of this data was big news, uh, and once people heard about it. No one had really known about it at this point, but the information started

to leak. And this is a good point to talk about how Facebook shares information among users. If you are a user, some of you may not use Facebook, but here's how it works. So you've got yourself a news feed, and that's where posts from your friends will show up, and occasionally, you know, posts from advertisers things like that will show up there too, And you can post your own things to Facebook, pictures, thoughts, whatever, and you probably know.

There are various privacy settings that you can activate before you post stuff to Facebook. You could choose public that means anyone who is on Facebook can view that material, or you can choose different privacy settings. You can set so that only your friends can read your posts, so anyone who isn't your friend won't see the post that you've you've put in. You can even exclude specific people, or you can select only specific people to be able

to see it. But you get the idea. Well, until if you developed an app for Facebook, you could request friends permission on that app, and that would give you access to view user friend data. And if a user says sure, yeah, i'll I want to use this app, I agree to that, then that would mean you would be able to view that user's friends as if you were that user. And in fact, it's like you have just become a friend to all of that users friends. So let's let's use an example to make this more clear.

Let's say that Ben Bolan Ben Boland's using Facebook and Ben Bowen comes across an app that I have made any Season is an app from before, and he sees that in this app, I've said I want to have permission to view your your friends data, and Ben Bolan, being the conniving jerk face that he is and not giving a care about the privacy of his friend's data, says, sure, I want to know what howson hogwarts I belong to.

I want to take this quiz, so he agrees. Then I get to see that all, not just all of Ben Bolen's data, but all of Ben Boland's friends data as if I were Ben Bowlen. I get to see all of his friends data, just as if I were him, and I can collect all that data and make use of it at all. Because he was so thoughtless, I should give out his email address so that you can send him complaints because he does that to me all

the time on his podcasts. But I'm not gonna because honestly, Ben Bolan is actually a really nice guy and I like him, but it's great to use him as an example. So this is why that number of people who may have been affected by the Cambridge Analytica scandal is so high at eighty seven million users, even though reportedly only two seventy thousand people actually took the survey and agreed to the the app permissions, and the average Facebook user

you see it has three thirty eight friends. That's that's the average some people and more some people if you were But if you multiply two by eight, you'll get more than nine million possible friends. And granted there's bound to be some overlap between different users. I'm honestly always surprised to find friends I know from very different circles who also happened to know each other. But you can see why that seven million number got there. So in

Facebook would change that policy. These days, if you develop an app, you can still send a friends permission request and Facebook will review your app before allowing it to be on the platform. But now that does not give you access to view all of the friends data of a user. Instead, what it does is it lets you see a list of friends of that user who also haven't all that same app. So you don't get new

information about new people. You just you just get to know about connections between existing people who have already downloaded your app. So you're just you know, you already have that other users information because they installed your app already. Um, so it's a very different policy. Well, when I come back, I'll talk more about what Cambridge Analytica did and why it got into so much trouble. But first, let's take

a quick break to thank our sponsor. Cambridge Analytica used all that data to build out psycho graphic models of potential voters, essentially putting them in these different categorizations. About two months before the Iowa caucus, Caucuses and primaries are how we decide which nominees within a party will become

the official party nominee for general election. If you're not from the United States, it gets pretty confused ing anyway, About two months before the Iowa Caucus, which is one of the the it's the first big event that can really set the tone for a nominee, The Guardian ran a story revealing that Cambrage Analytica had possession of unauthorized Facebook data and that therefore the Cruise campaign was depending upon information that was gathered in an unethical way, that

they were relying upon information that people did not consent to sharing. Facebook responded to this by telling Cambrage Analytica and Alexander Cogan that they needed to delete all that data. But Facebook really doesn't have any enforceable authority here. The data had already changed hands first to Alexander Cogan and then from Alexander Cogan to Cambridge Analytica. Chris Wiley said that at this point he had already left Cambrige gen

Ata and he had deleted that data. But all he had to do was fell out a little form and click a checkbox and said that onto Facebook to say, hey, yeah, I followed your instructions. But Facebook didn't take any steps to actually verify that. And he says he could have kept all of the data Facebook Facebook never would have known. Uh. And and years later people said that the information was still available from that time, that information that was gathered

by the initial app was still readily available. The New York Times reported the data at least some of it was still remaining in use as Cruise narrowly one in Iowa, and Alexander Nicks was very quick to jump on that news and boast about how his company, how Cambridge Analytica helped push Cruise to victory, and that Cruise had started in a very low place, like maybe polling at single

digit percentages, although that was not, you know true. Others on Cruises campaign staff were not very quick to give any credit to Cambridge Analytica, but Nicks was selling his idea to a bigger audience now and staffers on the campaign were concerned that Cambridge Analytica wasn't forthcoming and how it was coming up with the various categories for voters. They were not transparent in how they were making these determinations.

So the campaign staff says, we can't really tell how well we're doing, and we can't even we don't even know how they're coming to these determinations, so we can't judge how well they're doing in the United States. Uh, in order to become a nominee, like I said, you have to participate in these caucuses, in these primaries. By the time Cruizes campaign was working in South Carolina, staffers noticed that the data they were getting from Cambridge Analytica

was woefully out of date. CRUs would come in third place in South Carolina, and you didn't see Nick's jumping up on the news to talk about that problem. Cruises campaign stopped relying on Cambridge Analytica shortly thereafter, saying, you know, I don't think this is really working out. I don't think we're getting the return that we were promised. Now, Nix did have the chutzpa to appear at the Concordia Summit and claimed that Cambridge Analytica helped push ted Cruz

to a second place finish for the Republican nomination. Uh The story Nix was selling was that Cruise had been so far behind that getting second place was an enormous achievement all by itself, and that the only reason he was able to really get there was because Cambridge Analytica was able to lift him much further than he was

going to go on his own. That's not necessarily an accurate betrayal of what happened, as I understand it from the various reports I've read, but it appeared that that was Alexander Nick's messaging, and his next move was to take aim at the Trump campaign to see if Cambridge Analytica could get hired on to help in those efforts. He had already attempted once before, but Trump was not interested in hiring a political consultant that was already working

for one of his opponents. He had also around this time allegedly reached out to Julian Assange. He's the founder of Wicky Leaks. Assange had said that he got hold of internal emails from the Clinton campaign, and these are the same emails that we later discovered were harvested from a cyber attack that was led by Russian hackers. So Russian hackers attack Clinton's email servers, get access to these emails and send them to Julian Assange over at Wiki Leaks,

who then says, hey, I've got these emails. And then Alexander Nicks reaches out to Julian Osange and says, I'd really think we should talk about the possibility of making use of this information. According to an article in Mother Jones, Nicks really wanted to weaponize those emails, but Assange ended

up passing on that offer. Alexander Nicks would go on to claim this company had essentially done all the marketing and messaging for the Trump campaign, that Cambridge an Analytica was ultimately responsible for developing the approach Trump used during the whole election, and that Cambridge Analytica effectively won the presidency for Trump, and that it was because of Cambridge Analytica's research that Trump was able to target the voters

that would swing the election his way. He could lose the popular vote, and he did by nearly three million votes, but he won in areas that got him the electoral votes he needed to win the presidency, and Alexander Nick said that this was because Cambridge Analytica had done the research and knew who to target and that's why Trump won. Others in Trump's campaign are not so quick to credit

Cambridge Analytica. They dispute these claims. They say that the firm was not instrumental in Trump's messaging, and that most of those efforts were being funneled directly into Facebook from the campaign itself rather than through Cambridge Analytica, and that the consulting firm had even screwed up some major TV ad deals, serving ads and locations that were a complete bust, and that they were handling the campaign in a very

amateurish way. So, in other words, the story Nix was telling didn't seem to match up with what other people who had been involved in these campaigns had to say about the matter. Steve Bannon, who would become the chief political strategist for Trump for a while anyway, remained more or less in charge of Cambridge Analytica until April seventeen, which was several months after Trump had taken office, which

I don't know sounds like a conflict to me. By the end of twenty seventeen, Cambridge Analytica had withdrawn from pursuing consulting gigs in politics in the US. The official reason that Alexander Nicks gave was that there was going to be too many other political consulting firms in the mix, which meant there'll be more sharks in the water and not enough food. It's gonna be too competitive, not not lucrative enough, so the company was going to look elsewhere.

But a lot of the reports I read were very skeptical of this claim, because if in fact, you were a consulting firm that had just helped a candidate when the position of President of the United States, you would think you could leverage that into being a very lucrative

selling point for future campaigns. What these journalists have said is that effectively Cambridge Analytica had been under delivering on their their their promises regularly repeatedly, that perhaps those psychographic models that the company had been touting may not have been nearly as effective as the company was suggesting, and that also they had a general lack of knowledge about

how US politics work. That these Brits were coming into a US system and they didn't really understand the way politics work in the United States, and that all of this meant that people were viewing Cambridge Analytica as a bad consulting firm for at least for American politics, and it essentially landed the company on a do not hire a list for both parties. So the general consensus seemed to be that Trump had won the presidency despite participation

of Cambridge and Analytica, not because of it. So you've got two different stories here. You have Alexander Nick saying we're not gonna get involved in ten because there's not enough money in it, and you have everyone else saying you're not gonna get involved in ten because nobody wants you.

Was when things really fell apart for Cambridge Analytica. Over in the United Kingdom, the BBC sent in an undercover reporter to look into scl and Cambridge Analytica, which we're still claiming to be two separate entities, but we're operating

more or less as a single one. This reporter got got got stuff on tape, was able to capture on tape discussions in which Alexander Nix himself talked about spreading misinformation on purpose and even blackmailing political opponents of clients through entrapment, essentially by by hiring sex workers to go and and uh proposition those opponents and then use that

as a way of blackmailing those opponents. This gut, you know, came to light, it was published, it it aired, and then Alexander Nicks tried to shrug the whole thing off, said, oh, no, no, no, this, I wasn't talking about things we would actually do. I was engaging in this ridiculous hypothetical situation and uh in a way to try and win a client. But we

would never actually do any of that. And a lot of the people that Noah Alexander Nick say yeah, this is kind of in line with his approach anything to land that sale. So would the company have engaged in these behaviors Maybe not. Maybe that was all talk, but it's not good talk, especially not good talk to have

on tape and play out in public. Uh. This, by the way, would end up resulting in Cambridge Analytic a suspending Alexander Nix in response to that warn't coming out, and so he would be suspended as CEO and would effectively be removed from power over in the United States, investigations into Russian interference in the twenty sixteen elections extended over to Cambridge Analytica and Nicks was called to appear before the House Intelligence Committee via video conference so he

didn't have to travel to the States. His testimony was never made public. According to Alexander Nicks, he was only asked five questions and that was a total breeze, uh or maybe it was three questions. He said, was in and out in like five minutes. Also in twenty eighteen, the British Parliament called Nicks to appear before them to discuss another event that happened in sixteen, which was the UK's vote to leave the European Union, also known as Brexit. The general policy at s c L was that they

weren't going to get involved in local politics. Remember s c L and Cambridge Analytica both are located in the UK. But the company had also released a statement saying it was forming a partnership with an ganization campaigning in favor of Brexit. But Alexander Nick said his company never actually did any work. It was something that was announced but

never never actually came to fruition. According to Alexander Nick's investigations into that matter continue because they involve finance issues about rules about what, where and when money can be spent, and how these efforts can be coordinated or not coordinated. It gets really super complicated, and it involves another organization that's located of Canada, an organization that has connections to Chris Wiley, the data analysts who became a whistleblower for

Cambridge Analytica. But that probably will merit its own episode, and that investigation is still ongoing. So rather than do a half finished episode, I don't think I'd rather wait to hear more about it. Well, I do have a little bit more to say about Cambridge Analytica and the fallout that resulted from the various reports, but let's take

another quick break to thank our sponsor. Chris Wiley would tell The Observer that in July two thousand fourteen, he and Alexander Nixt met with executives of a company called Luke Oil. Luke Oil is the second largest oil company in Russia, and the head of Luke Oil was vat Alekporov, who was close friends with a guy you might have heard of, a guy named Vladimir Putin. Wiley said to the Observer that at the time he was confused why Cabrige Analytica was being called in to have a meeting

with a Russian oil company in the first place. I mean, why would an oil company want to know how Cabrige Analytica was targeting and profiling American voters and has sending out messaging to American voters. According to an email, Alexander Nick had said that the purpose was to explain how their work they were doing in US elections could apply to the Russian oil business, which left wildly totally at a loss. He said, I don't see where this connection is.

And according to Wiley, the presentation focused on ways to disrupt and affect elections. The entire presentation was really geared up to what cabra j Analytica was doing with the data that it had in the United States, and that seems to be a pretty strange presentation to give to

a petroleum company. Coincidentally, or maybe not so coincidentally, American intelligence indicates that it was right around this time when Russian hackers began targeting social media platforms to plant propaganda and fake stories in an effort to affect elections in the United States as well as push for Brexit in the UK. So this is where that fake news stuff starts starts to come in, the fake news that was planted in social media to rile up different UH electoral bases.

And so the suggestion is that perhaps this meeting between Cambrage Analytica and Luke Oil might have sparked this approach. Cambra Generalytica didn't appear to actually do any work with a Luke Oil, didn't appear to accept a contract, but did make this presentation that may have created that inspiration for Russia to interfere with the election through misinformation campaigns

using social media as the platform. Whether Cambridge Analytica had any measurable effect on the various elections in the United States remains a matter of debate. It also is not exactly a smoking gun case that the company contributed to Russia's interference with a two thousand sixteen election. Cambridge Analytica certainly tried to influence the election. They were hired to try and help various candidates get elected, and some of those candidates did get elected. I mean, that was the

whole point of it. But it mostly seems to come across as snake oil. To me, I'm sure there's merit in the idea behind it. I'm sure. I mean that it seems intuitive that if you know a lot about it person, you can more effectively communicate to that person. But it sounds to me that Alexander Nicks was largely more talk than substance when it came to producing results. This is based off the numerous reports I've read and the various sites that have posted people who are familiar

with the company and the way it worked. Um, just drawing those conclusions based on those numerous reports. Now, that doesn't change the fact that the company engaged in some really murky stuff. Leveraging Facebook data without user consent is a huge ethical problem, though the company has repeatedly denied it did any such thing, despite evidence pointing to the contrary, much of that evidence provided by Chris Wiley. In addition,

the mess is really brought into focus Facebook's role. The company did very little to protect user data and still does very little to protect user data. So why is that? Well, ultimately the answer comes down to money. You see, user data and privacy are of our data. Security specifically and privacy, they're a little concern to Facebook's shareholders. Those are the people who own stock in Facebook. What they want is

a return on investment. They want to spend money to own part of Facebook, and then they want Facebook to make way more money so that they get some of that money. So that means they want to see Facebook grow. They want to see it growing revenue, they want to see it growing users. They don't care about the quality of the service as long as it doesn't impact those numbers.

Facebook could be a terrible, terrible, terrible experience, but as long as it drove that growth and revenue and in users, shareholders aren't going to care because that doesn't that that's not important to them. What's important to them is that return on investment. So Facebook's primary focus has always been on delivering returns, not on creating a better service. And that's something that can happen to any company. I'm not singling Facebook out to say they are particularly at fault here.

They follow a very similar pathway that tons of other

companies follow. But when it's a company that's gathering tons of personal data about all of us, largely because we're sharing it willingly, but not not just through that, this becomes a concern, and I question Facebook's decision to ever allow developers to create apps that would give those developers access to the data belonging to friends of people who downloaded those apps, friends who had never actually been given the opportunity to say yes or no to having their

data shared. I think that's a terrible, terrible policy that to have ever been in place, and I'm glad that it's gone, but it never should have been there. So it's just not cool to say, hey, I can look at all your information because your buddy Bill said it was okay, Because the rash response to that is go take a flying leap, because Bill does not have the rights to give you permission to look at my information. And yet for years that's exactly how Facebook allowed developers

to create apps. As I mentioned earlier, they've since changed that policy, but it was ludicrous to have it in the beginning, not to mention this awful passing the buck situation has been going on between the various parties involved in this scandal. No one is taking accountability for this. So Facebook's initial response was, Hey, it's not our fault. We were told this was for an academic research project, and that met our criteria, so we said, go ahead,

it's fine. It's not our fault that they abused that. In fact, we told him to knock it off, as if somehow that makes it okay to share user data

without their consent. Then you have Alexander Cogan, whose response was nothing I did was technically illegal, which might be true, but that doesn't mean that it wasn't unethical and it was against Facebook's terms of service, although again Cogan had said I didn't read the terms of service, and clearly Facebook didn't read my terms of service, or else they would have never allowed my app to publish. So everyone is equally at fault because no one reads terms of service.

And Cambrage analyticas response was, Hey, all we did was by data. We didn't specifically hire anyone to scrape information well user consent, So no one is accepting responsibility for this. Uh, and I would argue that they all are at fault in some measure. The story reminds us that there remains out there a gray market, and that gray market is filled with information about us. It's the data we generate

as we navigate over the Internet. We create it when we post a social media we create it when we make an online purchase, we leave traces as we move from one website to another in our browsing histories. We created a messages. It's created about us without us even taking active participation, and all of that data has value to it. There are different ways you can use that data. You can use it to sell to people, you can

use it for political purposes, as Cambridge Analytica did. And that data is out there on the gray market, and it is for sale. If you have the money, you can buy it, and it's shockingly cheap on an individual basis. It's only when you start talking about in bulk that gets really expensive. But that is a disturbing thing to remember, and there's no indication that that's going to go away. As long as the money is there, it's gonna stick around.

Cambridge Analytica and its sister or parent or whatever company scl Elections they are no more. Both entities dissolved in the Spring of and while they no longer exist officially, investigations continue into both companies, and at least in the UK, we may see more efforts to bring charges against individuals who worked for those companies. The United States, it's a little less certain the House Intelligence Committee had an investigation,

but they shut that down. It was an investigation to look into Russian meddling in the US election that got shut down for reasons that I'm not going to go into because that gets super political and it doesn't really have a place in this podcast. Investigations in the US might come back at some point, but for the moment, it's mostly in the realm of journalism and out of

the courts in the US. Meanwhile, Alexander Nix and Rebecca Mercer, along with Silver others who were connected to Cambridge Analytica, ended up organizing to create a new data analyst company called Emmer Data E M. E R D A t A that was established in the summer of sev and its headquarters are in the same building where Cambridge Analytica

was now. According to Nigel Oaks, the guy who founded the company that eventually spawned Cambridge Analytica, the whole purpose for Emmer Data was ultimately to acquire Cambridge Analytica and s c L Elections together and form a brand new entity. But then everything fell apart, and according to Oakes, all of those organizations are now being wound down in the near future. They're not going to continue on um. That's according to Nigel Oaks. I don't know if that's official,

but that's what he says. Cogan's colleague, by the way, who helped build the app was Joseph Chancellor. So Cogan and Chancellor together built the survey and the Facebook application that was at the heart of the United States controversy. And here's a fun fact, Cogan would end up being labeled by Facebook as being a terrible, uh person who had well, maybe not a terrible person, but a person who had violated the terms of service that he had

created a tool that was in strict violation of Facebook's policies. However, Facebook also hired Joseph Chancellor to work for Facebook, so one of the two developers was pointed out as saying, you're a criminal, and the other one was hired to work for the company. Although to be fair, Joseph Chancellor no longer works for Facebook. Still interesting. Probably some sour grapes there, I'm guessing for Cogan, probably not terribly happy

about that. Anyway. That wraps up the confusing, complicated, sad, and infuriating tale of Cambridge Analytica, a company that I think ultimately was more about promising stuff that it might not have been able to deliver than anything else. But because it was wrapped up in this other issue with Facebook, it definitely was thrust into the spotlight. Otherwise, I think it probably would have just kind of faded out of US politics at least might have still gotten into trouble

elsewhere in the world. But in the US people seem to have gotten wise and just felt that it wasn't a valuable asset to have on your team. Interesting stuff. Well, in our next episode, we're going to shine a light on the dark Web. It was a listener request to take a look at what the dark web is and how it works. And then we will conclude the dark and scary week of tech stuff, and we'll we'll try and talk about fun things next week, like I don't know,

furbies or something. I'll figure it out. Tri's nodding. She's like, please, please pick a happy note. I'm tired of hearing about nuclear power and dark and deceptive politics. If you have suggestions for future episodes of Tech Stuff, whether it's a technology, a person, a company, whatever it may be, send me an email. The email address for the show is tech stuff at how stuff works dot com or drop me

a line on Facebook or Twitter. The handle for both of those is tech stuff h s W. You should also go on over to t public dot com slash tech stuff. I was looking at your shirt and it's nice, but it's looking like you know, you could spruce up your fashion a little bit, add some variety there. I know what you need. A tech stuff T shirt. It makes any wardrobe into a fabulous array of clothing. It'll brighten all the other clothes you put in there. See. Look,

I'm following Cambridge Analytica's lead. I'm making promises I can't deliver upon, but they know there really are great shirts. You need to go check them out t public dot com slash tech stuff, and don't forget follow us over at Instagram. I'm out and I'll talk to you again really soon. For more on this and thousands of other topics, is it how stuff works dot com