Channel 4 News reports thousands of Colorado Facebook users' data harvested and shared without their permission still is in circulation, in spite of Cambridge Analytica's assurance the information had been deleted.
The cache of campaign data from a Cambridge Analytica source, details 136,000 individuals in the US state of Colorado, along with each person’s personality and psychological profile.
The data, which dates from 2014, was used by Cambridge Analytica to target specific messages at residents who would be most susceptible to them.
As the harvesting scandal grew last week, Cambridge Analytica insisted all Facebook data it held, and any information they had derived using the Facebook data, “had been deleted”.
Facebook also said it took steps to ensure all information related to harvested profiles was “destroyed”.
But the Colorado dataset, along with similar data for Oregon, suggests copies of the Facebook-derived data still exists, and raises questions about who still has them.
Channel 4 News was able to track down and interview some of the individuals in Colorado whose data had been shared.
And residents in the middle-class suburb of Arvada, in the swing state of Colorado, were told: “If we [Channel 4 News] can get a copy of it, users would be naïve to assume that someone else can’t as well.”
Janice, a nurse whose data is included in the cache, said: “It’s a manipulation of our society by people who don’t really care about our society. They care about their business. They care about their bottom line and they aren’t here for all of us, other than they want to manipulate all of us because we’re either a voter or a consumer. And that’s how they look at me, they don’t look at how safe I am, or how good my schools are.”
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Debra, a local resident said: “It’s personal information, and just to have strangers be able to make an assessment about who we are and what our views are… whether it’s accurate or inaccurate… It’s unnerving to think that someone has and is keeping track of that information. I’m questioning if I scroll down something and click on it, to look at it more what’s involved in the post, then that’s them gathering data as well. It makes me really hesitant to even want to engage to that degree.”
However, not everyone was outraged.
Householder Barbara was asked: “Does it worry you that somehow people have extracted this information about you from your online profile?”
She said: “It doesn’t worry me … I just figured they were.”
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Sources have told Channel 4 News the Cambridge Analytica data was used by the Republicans in Colorado to help target voters.
Revealed: Cambridge Analytica data on thousands of Facebook users still not deleted (Channel 4 News)