ANGELO CARUSONE: What bothers me though is that number one, the data was allowed to be transferred from a research operation to Cambridge which then they could commercialize it and the thing that really bothers me now that we are aware of it is that while Facebook has suspended Cambridge Analytica’s ability to use this data, there’s very, very good indicia out there that there are replicas of this exact same data set currently being used and are currently in operation. And so far there hasn’t been any indication that Facebook has ensured that that data is not currently being used. And that’s the part that really concerns me, to be honest. So we should be worried.
[…]
They were actually able to track and use that 50 million records that they got in an ill-gotten way as seed. So if you and I were starting an advertising agency, competitors and you started from zero and had to do the standard kind of advertising, targeting that you pointed out before and I started in the way that Cambridge Analytica was which was that a researcher handed over 50 million records to me that would not only be cheated but it would be radically unfair, I’d have an enormous head start and all of those people that participated in that didn’t do so to help a company, they did it for research purposes and that’s really what we’re talking about here.
COLIN BRAZIER (HOST): We’re nearly out of time, in a word do you think it did swing the election for Trump?
CARUSONE: I think that cheating swung the election, I think the kinds of malfeasance and in particular the voter suppression that the Trump campaign was able to execute in part because they were aided by the targeting. I don’t put much stock in the psychographics I think that’s just marketing on the parts of Cambridge Analytica but their ability to target people because they had such precision in their records, it certainly had the effect of keeping people home, I mean only 10,000 votes in Michigan.
