Firstly there is the right or legit way Facebook uses and sells data for marketing purposes.
As a general rule Facebook provides aggregated data to advertisers, so if you lived in Oxfordshire in the UK, then Facebook aggregates all data of people who it identifies as living in Oxfordshire. It would then in accordance with general marketing data rules (this is a sample size, not the legal rule) they would remove some data as it easily identifies a person which risks further identifications of actual people and then bundle up some insights either as a data set or through their own software for marketers. Cambridge Analytica is different in two ways.
First, they directly engaged with US peoples accounts on facebook using an app. I won't call out any, however, you can be reasonably assured any app on Facebook isn't there for your enjoyment, it is to get at your data. Cambridge Analytica simply created an app, had people engage with the app. It might have been guessing my age or funny captions for a photo, but it reeled in a significant number of people. When you connected to that app it would have asked for certain permissions. It now officially had access to whatever data you agreed to share. Here is where the game changed. Cambridge Analytica had realised that due to a bug that they could access the data not only what you had provided for, but additional data and just about as much from your friends. Now as many of us who don't live in the US have friends in the US. Cambridge Analytica did not discriminate, they simply sucked down anything within their ability to access and took all that data into a pond of their own making.
A couple of things, unless you sent credit card details via a messenger post to someone there is little risk of credit card data being there. If your full home address is there, then you are at risk of having that in the pond of data Cambridge Analytica gathered.
Why did they go to that trouble and what was the outcome.
Without providing a lesson in statistics, there are plenty of them freely available on the web, the whole thing was to identify what your associations are and therefore profile you, particularly if you reside in the US, I am betting they did it for everyone with varying degrees of success if they have your data. Why??
If you liked a post about a lot of environmental issues it means you might not like people taking down environmental protection rules. How do I convince you that the person who is planning taking down the environmental laws is the good guy I make sure that I provide you information that shows why the current rules favour someone who is not you(you are missing out). This is the sneaky way in which they targeted people with ads or fake news items which were to alter peoples perception. If you can create cognitive dissonance with someone you have a reasonable chance of changing their mind.
This has been an ongoing trend in businesses that a customers data is more important than the customer as once they have it they have it potentially for life.
GDPR will put pressure on operators in Europe and the rest of the world need to follow the European standard. Countries which don't have data provisions similar to GDPR need to start moving or expect to be annihilated at the next elections for failing to protect their citizens from such unruly behaviour and such a disregard for users data.
To recap there was a breach in the way the facebook was being accessed through the provided interface. This allowed Cambridge Analytica to access far more data than they ever should have been allowed to.
This was a major failure in Facebook engineering and their privacy and security practices.
This data then appears to have been misused to target ads to people. It is quite possible someone you sit next to at work was getting a very different political message than you and your friends with a similar group being other cohorts from your workplace and possibly user group you share membership of.
Facebook is in hot water in a variety of countries right now including the hearing in Congress next week.
See ya round
Peer
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