Fact is if you dig deeper, CA actually kinda stinks. Ken Vogel of Politico, below, has been reporting on the psycho-graphic firm since the 2016 election cycle:
Even the guy in charge of CA says it's worthless. From Julia Carrie-Wong of the Guardian:
“People may feel angry and violated if they think their data was used in some kind of mind-control project,” Aleksandr Kogan, the now notorious Cambridge University psychologist whose app collected data on up to 87 million Facebook users, said during a US Senate hearing. “This is science fiction. The data is entirely ineffective.”
“If the goal of Cambridge Analtyica was to show personalized advertisements on Facebook, then what they did was stupid,” Kogan said, arguing that it is much more effective for any advertiser to use Facebook’s own advertising targeting tools.
Kogan’s dismissal of psychometrics’ predictive value is certain to irk his former colleagues at Cambridge University’s Psychometrics Centre. Researchers with the renowned program published a widely cited study showing that Facebook likes could be used to predict a wide array of personality traits.
Facebook recently provided a tool to let you download *all* of your FB data. So I tried it. It came out to about 5MB, which seems rather small considering I've been active on FB since when it was "thefacebook.com". And as I expected, my data is not all that interesting -- mostly poorly written status updates and links to dumb articles.
Even with the new evidence (reported by journalist extraordinaire Jane Meyer of the New Yorker) that CA was involved in the UK campaign for Brexit, doesn't really change the reality that it's overhyped and terrible at what it does. In a nutshell, CA is just a well-funded troll farm, boosted by right-wing donor Robert Mercer and crazy/ambitious Steve Bannon, albeit one with lofty global aspirations.
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