In 2013, a British influence contractor spun up an American offshoot with an academic-sounding name and one product: the claim that it held five thousand data points on nearly every American adult, and knew which of your fears would move you. A personality quiz taken by roughly 270,000 people became, by Facebook's own later accounting, as many as 87 million harvested profiles.
Within five years the firm was the most feared name in politics. Then came one catastrophic week in March 2018: the platform suspension, the whistleblower in The Guardian and The New York Times, and Channel 4's undercover tape of the chief executive offering services that had nothing to do with data science. The clients vanished in weeks. Ninety days after the world finally believed the pitch, Cambridge Analytica did not exist.
The autopsy finding: they were not brought down by what they hid. They were brought down by what they advertised. If the product worked, it was a threat; if it did not, it was fraud. There was no version of the pitch that was safe to be famous for.
Certificate of corporate death
NAME: CAMBRIDGE ANALYTICA BORN: 2013, as an offshoot of SCL Group DIED: May 2, 2018 (administration UK / Chapter 7 US) CAUSE OF DEATH:FOUNDER SCANDAL UNDERLYING: terminal marketing - the product claims were fatal whether or not they were true
Timeline
2013 Founded as SCL Group's US elections offshoot; reported Mercer funding, Bannon board seat
2014 thisisyourdigitallife quiz harvests friends-of-takers data; Facebook changes the rule, not retroactively
2016 FEC filings show millions from the Cruz and Trump campaigns
MAR 16 2018 Facebook suspends the firm from its platform
MAR 17 2018 Christopher Wylie goes public in The Guardian and The New York Times
MAR 19-20 2018 Channel 4 broadcasts the undercover tape; CEO suspended
MAR 23 2018 ICO raids the London offices, warrant in hand
MAY 2 2018 All operations cease; administration and Chapter 7
JUL 2019 FTC fines Facebook $5B - largest privacy penalty to date; $100M SEC settlement
OCT 2020 UK Insolvency Service bans Alexander Nix from directorships for seven years
BUDINSKI SAYS
Fear, sex, and greed. The big three levers. I have that slide.