The Cambridge Analytica Scandal, Five Years Later: Part 1

This is Part 1 of two episodes looking back on the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which arguably kicked off five years ago when the New York Times and the Guardian published articles on March 17, 2018. The Times headline was “How Trump Consultants Exploited the Data of Millions,” while the Guardian went with “Revealed: 50 million Facebook profiles harvested for Cambridge Analytica in major data breach.”

That number, and the scale of the scandal, would only grow in the weeks and months ahead. It served as a major catalyzing moment for privacy concerns in the social media age. In these two episodes we’ll look back on what has happened since, the extent to which perceptions of what happened have changed or been challenged, and what unresolved questions that emerged from the scandal mean for the future.

In this first episode, Justin Hendrix speaks with David Carroll, a professor of media design in the MFA Design and Technology graduate program at the School of Art, Media and Technology at Parsons School of Design at The New School. Carroll legally challenged Cambridge Analytica in the UK courts to recapture his 2016 voter profile using European data protection law, events that were chronicled in the 2019 Netflix documentary The Great Hack.