Who Paid Cambridge Analytica?

The Trump campaign, said it paid Cambridge Analytica, a total of $6M for its services.

When you do the math, it costs a lot more than that, to purchase the data used for the campaign, from Facebook.

This is just for the data.

I assume Cambridge Analytica, is not running a charity, so who paid the balance, AND, Cambridge Analytica's fees?

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Byron8by7 · M

A super PAC, Make America #1, probably paid for it.

https://www.npr.org/2018/03/21/595481686/cambridge-analyticas-legal-challenges

Northwest · M

@Byron8by7 Thanks for the link. This would explain part of it. Facebook, in a few weeks, will shutter their Graph API v 2.5. It's not related to the Cambridge Analytica (CA) thing, but this would be one of the ways, someone, like CA, can get the data legally (they would be paying FB for the use of the API, to collect the data). Targeting 50M users, would require a lot more than that, and also means they may have violated to the FB Terms Of Service, by reselling the data (though they may have gotten around it, by running the ad campaign themselves).

Byron8by7 · M

@Northwest

CA did a survey of some 270,000 Facebook members, and then "scrubbed" the data from their FB friends, which is where the 50 million FB members came from.

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Northwest · M

@Byron8by7 [quote]CA did a survey of some 270,000 Facebook members, and then "scrubbed" the data from their FB friends, which is where the 50 million FB members came from.[/quote]

It gets pretty complicated, pretty fast. This is why I was wondering where the money came from.

Once you start using the Graph API, to collect data, it's a multi dimensional spanning tree, algorithmic nightmare. This space is not the proper place for the algorithmic discussion, I was just wondering where the money came from, as 270K users, may lead to 50M profiles, but to get there, on your own, that's $Ms in IT spending.

Byron8by7 · M

@Northwest

Perhaps that will be exposed. Some kind of "dark money," or some such.