10 Aug 2019

David Carroll - Cambridge Analytica and ‘The Great Hack’

From Saturday Morning, 8:10 am on 10 August 2019

Professor David Carroll, from Parsons School of Design in New York, is one of the central figures in 'The Great Hack', a recently released Netflix documentary looking at the Cambridge Analytica/Facebook data scandal from 2018.

The revelations that data from tens of millions of Facebook users was being harvested and improperly used to serve targeted ads designed to influence the outcome of elections around the world (in countries including Trinidad and Tobago, Kenya, and memorably in the 2016 US Presidential Election), led Carroll to try to recover the personal data held about him through the courts.

After a legal battle lasting for more than two years, Cambridge Analytica's parent company finally pled guilty to criminal charges of disobeying the British data regulator, who fined it and ordered it to hand over all the data about Carroll they had collected. He is still to receive it!