Cambridge Analytica
Based on Wikipedia: Cambridge Analytica
In 2018, a British company you'd never heard of became the face of everything unsettling about the digital age. Cambridge Analytica didn't steal credit card numbers or hack government databases. It did something arguably more invasive: it built psychological profiles of nearly ninety million people, mostly without their knowledge, and used that information to try to change how they voted.
The company's story reads like a thriller. There are Old Etonians and billionaires, honey traps and bribery schemes, connections to Russian intelligence and the Brexit referendum, and at the center of it all, a quiz app that seemed as harmless as finding out which Harry Potter house you belong to.
The Company Behind the Company
To understand Cambridge Analytica, you have to understand its parent: the SCL Group. Founded in the 1990s by a man named Nigel Oakes—known in British tabloids as the former boyfriend of Lady Helen Windsor, a cousin of King Charles—SCL described itself as a "global election management agency." That anodyne phrase concealed something far more provocative.
SCL specialized in what the military calls psychological operations. It worked for governments and armed forces around the world, studying how to manipulate public opinion and shape political outcomes. One journalist compared the company's hypothetical scenarios to planning coups. Throughout the 2000s, SCL built its reputation influencing elections in developing countries, often in places where the line between military operations and political campaigns was deliberately blurred.
In 2013, SCL created a subsidiary focused on a new market: the Western world. They called it Cambridge Analytica.
The Cast of Characters
The company attracted an unusual coalition of money and influence. Among its investors were some of the British Conservative Party's largest donors, including the billionaire Vincent Tchenguiz and former minister Jonathan Marland. But the real financial muscle came from America: Robert Mercer, a hedge fund manager worth billions, invested at least fifteen million dollars. Steve Bannon, who would later become Donald Trump's chief strategist, held a stake worth one to five million dollars.
Running the operation was Alexander Nix, an Old Etonian who served as chief executive. Nix was also a director of nine similar companies sharing the same London address, a web of corporate entities that would later frustrate investigators trying to trace data flows and financial connections.
The company set up offices in London, New York, and Washington. It hired data scientists and psychologists. And it developed what it claimed was a revolutionary approach to political persuasion.
The Psychology of Persuasion
Cambridge Analytica's pitch was seductive. The company claimed it could profile every adult in America—all 230 million of them—using roughly five thousand data points per person. With this information, it said, it could predict not just how you might vote, but what you secretly feared, what you truly wanted, and how you might be persuaded to change your mind.
The theoretical foundation came from academic psychology. Researchers at Cambridge University had developed methods for inferring personality traits from digital behavior. A scientist named Michal Kosinski showed that by analyzing Facebook likes, you could assess someone's personality more accurately than their friends or family could. The implications were staggering: if you could identify someone as neurotic and conscientious, you could craft messages that spoke directly to those traits.
Cambridge Analytica used what psychologists call the Big Five personality model—a framework that measures openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. The company claimed it could sort American voters into thirty-two different personality types and tailor political messages accordingly. Someone anxious about crime might receive ads emphasizing law and order. Someone open to new experiences might get messaging about innovation and change.
This technique has a name: psychological targeting. It works by extracting personality profiles from digital footprints—your likes, tweets, purchases, searches—and then using those profiles to craft messages designed to influence your emotions and behavior. It's the same basic principle that makes personalized advertising work, but applied to democracy itself.
The Data Harvest
The company had a problem, though. Building psychological profiles required massive amounts of personal data. Where would it come from?
The answer arrived in the form of Aleksandr Kogan, a psychologist at Cambridge University. Kogan had created a Facebook app called "This Is Your Digital Life"—one of those personality quizzes that were ubiquitous on social media at the time. Take the quiz, answer some questions, get a report about your personality. Simple.
About 270,000 people took Kogan's quiz. But here's where the story takes its dark turn. In 2015, Facebook's policies allowed app developers to collect data not just about people who used their apps, but about those users' entire friend networks. Each person who took the quiz unknowingly provided access to their friends' data too.
The result: data on approximately 87 million Facebook users, the vast majority of whom had never heard of the quiz, much less consented to having their information harvested.
Kogan had told Facebook he was collecting data for academic research. Instead, he sold it to Cambridge Analytica. This violated Facebook's terms of service, but the violation wouldn't become public knowledge for years.
The Election Business
Cambridge Analytica put its methods to work. The company claimed involvement in forty-four American political races in 2014 alone. In 2015, it signed on with Ted Cruz's presidential campaign, helping the Texas senator's long-shot bid for the Republican nomination.
But the campaign that made Cambridge Analytica infamous was Donald Trump's.
In 2016, the company joined Trump's team. Alexander Nix would later boast, in secretly recorded footage, that Cambridge Analytica "ran all of Trump's digital campaign." Whether this was accurate or characteristic Nix exaggeration became a matter of intense debate. What's certain is that the company had unprecedented access to voter data and used its psychological profiling methods in service of Trump's candidacy.
Across the Atlantic, the company also worked with Leave.EU, one of the organizations campaigning for Britain to exit the European Union. This connection would become particularly controversial when investigators began examining possible foreign interference in the Brexit vote.
The Scandal Breaks
In March 2018, everything unraveled.
The New York Times and The Observer published exposés revealing how Cambridge Analytica had acquired Facebook user data. The stories were damaging, but what came next was devastating.
Channel 4, a British television network, had spent four months conducting an undercover investigation. A reporter posed as a potential client, claiming to represent Sri Lankan political candidates seeking help winning elections. In hidden-camera footage, Cambridge Analytica executives revealed how the company really operated.
Alexander Nix, caught on tape, described using honey traps—sending attractive women to seduce politicians into compromising situations. He discussed bribery schemes, fake news websites, and opposition research tactics that would make even hardened political operatives uncomfortable. The company, executives bragged, had worked on more than two hundred elections around the world.
The fallout was immediate. Facebook banned Cambridge Analytica from its platform. Britain's Information Commissioner sought a warrant to search the company's servers. Nix was suspended as chief executive.
On May 1, 2018, Cambridge Analytica filed for insolvency and shut down.
The Russian Connection
The company's closure didn't end the investigations. What emerged was a web of connections that extended far beyond Facebook data and political advertising.
Sam Patten was a contractor who worked with Cambridge Analytica. He was also connected to Paul Manafort, Trump's former campaign chairman. Through Manafort, sensitive polling and election data from the 2016 campaign was passed to Konstantin Kilimnik—a man whom American intelligence identified as a Russian agent. Kilimnik was later indicted during the investigation into foreign interference in American elections.
The picture that emerged was of Cambridge Analytica as one node in a larger network. Data flowed through the company, sometimes in directions its executives may not have fully controlled or understood.
In 2020, Britain's Information Commissioner closed a three-year inquiry into Cambridge Analytica's involvement in Brexit. The commissioner concluded that the company was "not involved" in the referendum campaign and found no evidence of Russian interference. But by then, the damage to public trust was done.
The Phoenix Companies
Cambridge Analytica died, but its DNA lived on.
Even before the company formally closed, its executives were establishing new ventures. Emerdata Limited was incorporated with a familiar cast: Alexander Nix, Rebekah Mercer, Jennifer Mercer, and Johnson Chun Shun Ko—a businessman with connections to Erik Prince, the founder of the private military company Blackwater.
In July 2018, former Cambridge Analytica staff launched Auspex International, a company focused on influencing politics in Africa and the Middle East. Data Propria emerged the following month, run by former Cambridge Analytica officials. A firm called Emic, staffed by people from SCL's defense contracting work, was revealed in 2020 to be continuing government contracts.
The expertise hadn't disappeared. It had scattered and reformed, like mercury drops finding new vessels.
The Reckoning
In December 2022, Meta—Facebook's parent company—agreed to pay $725 million to settle a class-action lawsuit over the Cambridge Analytica data breach. It was one of the largest privacy settlements in history, though divided among the millions of affected users, individual payouts would be modest.
The Federal Trade Commission filed its own complaint against Cambridge Analytica in 2019, alleging misuse of data. But by then, the company existed only as a legal ghost, its servers dark, its offices empty.
Did It Actually Work?
Here's the uncomfortable truth at the heart of the Cambridge Analytica story: we still don't know if any of it actually worked.
Political scientists have consistently questioned the company's claims about its ability to target and persuade voters. The connection between Facebook likes and voting behavior may be real but weak. The effect of psychologically targeted advertising may be measurable in laboratory conditions but trivial in the chaos of an actual election. Cambridge Analytica's executives had every incentive to exaggerate their capabilities to attract clients and investors.
What's undeniable is the company's ambition and the methods it was willing to employ. Whether the honey traps and bribery schemes were real tactics or sales pitches designed to impress foreign clients, the fact that executives discussed them so freely reveals a corporate culture untethered from normal ethical constraints.
What Cambridge Analytica Revealed
The company's real legacy may be what it exposed about the broader digital ecosystem.
For years, Facebook had allowed app developers to harvest data from users' friend networks—a design decision that prioritized growth and engagement over privacy. Cambridge Analytica didn't hack Facebook; it exploited policies that Facebook itself had created. The quiz app was the door; Facebook had left it unlocked.
The scandal also revealed how easily psychological research could be weaponized. Academic work on personality prediction, developed with scientific curiosity about human behavior, became a tool for political manipulation. The scientists who pioneered these techniques hadn't imagined them being used to micro-target voters with fear-inducing messages.
Perhaps most importantly, Cambridge Analytica demonstrated that the infrastructure for mass psychological manipulation exists. Even if this particular company failed to use it effectively, the data and methods remain. The advertising technologies developed by Facebook and Google can predict behavior with frightening accuracy. Political campaigns, foreign intelligence services, and anyone willing to pay can access sophisticated targeting tools.
The Lesson
Cambridge Analytica was both more and less than it claimed to be. It wasn't the all-powerful manipulation machine its executives boasted about in secret recordings. But it wasn't harmless either.
The company sat at the intersection of several troubling trends: the monetization of personal data, the industrialization of political persuasion, the globalization of election interference, and the willingness of technology platforms to look away while their tools were misused. It showed what happens when psychological science meets unlimited data meets billions of dollars in political spending.
The company is gone now, dissolved into legal proceedings and corporate successors. But the world it revealed—where our personalities are data, our fears are levers, and our votes are targets—that world is still here.
We all live in it.