Pulling information from 50 million Facebook profiles reportedly amounts to the tech giant's biggest ever data breach - though that figure is disputed by the company.
Channel 4 News, the Guardian and the New York Times all published stories carrying interviews with Wylie yesterday.
At the heart of the reporting was Cambridge Analytica, a company owned by billionaire Robert Mercer and once involving Steve Bannon, Trump's ex-chief strategist. The company's actions in the US and abroad have generated scrutiny from government investigators.
The firm specialised in voter-profiling and was involved in US political campaigns in the 2014 midterm elections and the 2016 presidential race. To improve its models, the firm reportedly worked with Aleksandr Kogan, a Cambridge University academic, who built the app that got Facebook users to take a survey.
Kogan passed on the data to Cambridge Analytica, though it is disputed whether any privacy rules were broken in this process.
Wylie claimed that when a Facebook user took the survey, data would be scraped from hundreds of their friends' online profiles without their knowledge. Wylie, who has since been in legal dispute with Cambridge Analytica, denied he was acting for commercial advantage, saying that he regrets what took place.
A Cambridge Analytica spokesman said that for the "avoidance of doubt" none of Kogan's data was used in Cambridge Analytica's 2016 election work.
Facebook said it was suspending Cambridge Analytica - as well as Wylie and Kogan - "pending further information".
Facebook issued a statement noting its past actions to limit access to this kind of personal information, which, until changes were made in 2014 and 2015, was routinely available about any users who did not explicitly act to prevent the release of what "like" buttons they had hit. "In 2014, after hearing feedback from the Facebook community, we made an update to ensure that each person decides what information they want to share about themselves, including their friend list."
Political persuasion and the science of big data
Cambridge Analytica has had a rapid rise. It claimed it had reached new heights in marrying the art of political persuasion with the science of big data.
Four years after the company began offering Republican political candidates the promise of groundbreaking tools for delivering political messages tailored to the psychological traits of voters, serious questions remain about its tactics and effectiveness. What is clear is that the services Cambridge Analytica offered are increasingly coveted by modern political campaigns.
Trump's campaign paid Cambridge Analytica at least US$6 million for data analysis in the final five months of a close election. Cambridge Analytica did data modelling and polling that showed Trump's strength in the industrial Midwest, shaping a homestretch strategy that led to his upset wins in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.
"This is more evidence that the online political advertising market is essentially the Wild West," said Senator Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee. "Whether it's allowing Russians to purchase political ads, or extensive microtargeting based on ill-gotten user data, it's clear that, left unregulated, this market will continue to be prone to deception and lacking in transparency."
Cambridge Analytica has denied wrongdoing. "We worked with Facebook over this period to ensure that they were satisfied that we had not knowingly breached any of Facebook's terms of service and also provided a signed statement to confirm that all Facebook data and their derivatives had been deleted," Cambridge Analytica said.
During the US presidential election, Facebook employees assisting Donald Trump's digital operation worked in the same office as Cambridge Analytica workers, according to a video by the BBC.
Despite years of reports of developers abusing data, Facebook's processes for dealing with developers who broke the company's rules were lax, said two former Facebook employees whose job it was to review data use by third parties. The company does not audit developers who siphon data, the people said. Sandy Parakilas, a former privacy manager at Facebook, said that during his tenure at Facebook, the company did not conduct a single audit of developers.
SCL, Cambridge's parent company, has said it has worked in 100 countries, including serving military clients with techniques in "soft power," or persuasion.
- Telegraph Group Ltd, Washington Post
