Carlos Bastarache: christopher-wylie.jpg

Tuesday, 27 March 2018

christopher-wylie.jpg

Getty Image

The Cambridge Analytica whistleblower keeps spilling the goods after ruining Mark Zuckerberg’s month a few weeks ago. Christopher Wylie initially revealed how the right-wing data operation harvested data from 50 million Facebook users, which has caused a PR disaster over the data breach. There’s now legal trouble brewing in the U.S. and U.K. for Cambridge Analytica and possibly Facebook. Wiley also revealed that his old firm assigned foreign workers to GOP campaigns, and now, he’s dropped more on British Parliament.

In this latest whistleblowing-drama installment, Wylie revealed that a Canadian firm, AggregateIQ, developed the Ripon software and used it to identify Republican voters. This data was used in an attempt to sway the U.S. election in favor of Donald Trump by manipulating Facebook’s algorithms to harvest those millions or user profiles, and here’s more about Ripon and from Wylie, courtesy of Reuters:

Ripon, the town in which the Republican Party was founded in 1854, was the name given to a tool that let a campaign manage its voter database, target specific voters, conduct canvassing, manage fundraising and carry out surveys.

“There’s now tangible proof in the public domain that AIQ actually built Ripon, which is the software that utilised the algorithms from the Facebook data,” Wylie told the British Parliament’s Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee.

Meanwhile, AggregateIQ denied to Reuters that it has ever been contracted with Cambridge Analytica. The latter mostly seconded the denial (in regard to the Facebook profile data) but added that the two firms had “communication” leading up to December 2015, so who’s telling the truth? Cambridge Analytica’s CEO got busted while admitting to using sex workers to entrap politicians, and multiple former workers have accused the firm of using inaccurate immigration documents to send foreign employees to work with GOP campaigns. It’s pretty clear that Cambridge Analytica’s shadiness knows no bounds, and there’s bound to be further revelations on the way.

(Via Reuters)