How Cambridge Analytica profiled voters and what it means for India

A recent Federal Trade Commission (FTC) order holding US-based Cambridge Analytica guilty of “deceptive practices to harvest personal information from tens of millions of Facebook users for voter profiling and targeting” has shed new light on the business of psychological profiling aimed at predicting voter behavior. The Commission’s order spells in great detail the technicalities, business and potential impact of voter-profiling on election results.

How did the Cambridge Analytica model work?

The now-bankrupt firm’s chief Alexander Nix primarily relied on new research that was done in the University of Cambridge that used Facebook profile information to predict an individual’s personality according to the OCEAN scale. The OCEAN scale is also known as the five big personality traits measure an individual’s personality on five counts - openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. Researchers had developed an algorithm that used an individual’s Facebook likes to predict their personality traits – the more the likes a person had, the more accurate the algorithm’s prediction would be. A researcher at the university named Aleksandr Kogan had developed an application that could collect personal data from not just those Facebook users who had installed this application but also data about their friends who were not using the application. Read More