Infamous for manipulating polls, Cambridge Analytica is a non-entity today

On Friday, CBI registered a criminal conspiracy case against Cambridge Analytica and Global Science Research for illegally harvesting personal data of Facebook users in India

Once at the centre of a global storm for allegedly manipulating elections in the US  and other countries, Cambridge Analytica is a non-entity today. However, it does hold the rather dubious distinction of being synonymous with misuse of personal data and harvesting data from online firms.

On Friday, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) registered a criminal conspiracy case against Cambridge Analytica and Global Science Research for illegally harvesting personal data of Facebook (FB) users in India.

Privately held Cambridge Analytica was created in 2013 to participate in American politics, and was later accused of interfering in US elections of 2016 in favour of former US president Donald Trump. Cambridge Analytica was an offshoot of British firm Strategic Communication Laboratories (SCL), which “provides data, analytics and strategy to governments and military organizations worldwide”.

Facebook user data was accessed with the help of an app called thisisyourdigitallife, developed to mine data by Dr Aleksandr Kogan, founder and director of Global Research Science (UK), as part of the criminal conspiracy with Cambridge Analytica in 2015 to illegally use the harvested databases for commercial purposes.

It filed for bankruptcy in May 2018 after suffering a sharp drop in business in the aftermath of the whistleblower revelations about how the firm accessed Facebook users’ data through a third-party app and used it for targeted political advertising. Its parent SCL Elections also filed for bankruptcy at the same time. Facebook said at the time that Cambridge Analytica had gained access to as many as 87 million user profiles, most of them in the US.

In 2019, Fast Company reported how both Cambridge Analytica and SCL were mostly acquired by a holding company called Emerdata, headed by Julian Wheatland, the former CEO of Cambridge Analytica and some other SCL companies. It is, however, still not clear what happened to the vast amounts of personal data harvested and whether Emerdata will utilise them. The CBI action follows its preliminary inquiry initiated in July 2018, based on inputs received from the Ministry of Information and Technology (MeitY) on the alleged data theft.

Salman Waris, managing partner at technology law firm TechLegis Advocates and Solicitors, said the charges include “dishonesty and fraudulently” collecting and harvesting “unauthorised” data of 335 Indian users and 562,000 “additional” users of Facebook, who were in their friend’s network. “This is a punishable offence under sections 43 and 43 A of the Indian Information Technology Act. Besides, the use of the same for commercial purposes is a breach of the Intermediary Rules framed under section 79 of the Act,” said Waris. “However, the fact that CBI has filed the FIR after a lapse of two years and only conducted a preliminary enquiry raises questions and clouds the move as being a result of geopolitical changes and also an effort to justify the government’s recent push to regulate social media platforms,” he added. After obtaining a legal opinion from an additional solicitor general, MeitY in July 2018 had written to the agency seeking an independent probe against Cambridge Analytica. The firm was also said to have been in talks with political parties in India.

Alexander Nix, the former CEO of Cambridge Analytica, was “disqualified for seven years from acting as a director or directly or indirectly becoming involved, without the permission of the court, in the promotion, formation or management of a company” by the UK’s Insolvency Service last September.

Companies like Cambridge Analytica, which has been described as a political consultancy or data mining and analysis firm, buy or obtain data from various sources, take this vast amount of unconnected data, match it with voter profiles and databases, identify the voting preferences of every single voter within an area, and target those who can be “turned” into a successful vote for their client.

The data could be as granular as people’s spending habits, whether they are introverts or extroverts, whether they are vegetarian or non-vegetarian, their caste, their religion, and their political ideology and which party they are most likely to vote for.

Cambridge Analytica was known for being backed by right-wing billionaire Robert Mercer, and is also known to back right-wing movements and parties. Mercer was also widely known as a Donald Trump supporter in the run up to the 2016 US Presidential Elections.

After Cambridge Analytica’s interference came to light, Facebook faced several investigations into its data protection policies. As a result, it agreed to pay fines to different countries, including $643,000 in the UK, $1 million in Italy, $100 million to the US Securities and Exchange Commission and $5 billion to the FTC.