Thread by @WIRED

This week marks the one-year anniversary of Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal, which turned a little-known political consulting firm into the poster child for how personal data can be misused. 1/ wired.trib.al/jQ1g8VD

Cambridge Analytica used Facebook data collected from tens of millions of Americans without their consent to build a “psychological warfare tool,” which it unleashed on US voters before the 2016 presidential election. 2/ wired.trib.al/jQ1g8VD

In December 2014, John Rust, a professor at the University of Cambridge, warned about the potential danger of Facebook data manipulation. 6 months later, Trump launched his presidential campaign that depended, in part, on Cambridge Analytica's work. 3/ wired.trib.al/rhSbjfx

But it took until 2018, when a pink-haired whistleblower named Christopher Wylie told his story to the New York Times and Guardian/Observer, for there to be widespread outrage. By that point, people knew how the story ended—with the election of Trump. 4/ wired.trib.al/jQ1g8VD

Before the news broke, Facebook banned Cambridge Analytica from its platform. But it was too little, too late. Today Facebook and its data-sharing policies are the subject of multiple investigations, including a criminal inquiry reported last week. 5/ wired.trib.al/ONJQQdh

And while Cambridge Analytica shut down in the scandal’s aftermath, its former executives are still being called to answer questions by Congress. 6/ wired.trib.al/KH88N1F

The scandal has sparked a wider privacy reckoning among the public and, notably, lawmakers, on a state and federal level. 7/
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A year after Cambridge Analytica made headlines, none of our questions about privacy have yielded easy answers. But the ordeal at least has forced these conversations, once the domain of academics and privacy nerds, into the mainstream. Read more: 8/ wired.trib.al/jQ1g8VD