Many of Cambridge Analytica’s former employees are now allegedly working on President Trump’s 2020 re-election campaign. This is according to a report from the Associated Press, which reports that the campaign is using a new data analysis company, Data Propria, and has begun working on a project that is similar to what Cambridge Analytica was tasked with doing for Trump’s 2016 campaign. Data Propria is headed up by Matt Oczkowski who was a strategist at Cambridge Analytica. Naturally, Oczkowski has denied the claim. The company is also affiliated with at least four other employees that used to work with Cambridge Analytica.
Cambridge Analytica became a huge scandal for Facebook just a few months ago, when it was made public that the company had farmed a ton of data from Facebook users to help get Donald Trump elected. Now Cambridge Analytica didn’t do this just for Trump, they had also worked with various other campaigns as well, and were successful. But while working for the Trump Campaign, Cambridge Analytica had developed applications that were used on Facebook to get contact lists and create ads that were able to get more votes for Trump. It was a pretty big issue for Facebook, and tens of millions of users had their data scraped from the site. This culminated with Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg having to testify before Congress last month. The issue with Cambridge Analytica wasn’t that it was collecting information (many companies do this already, including Facebook and Google), but the issue was the fact that Cambridge Analytica had done it while violating Facebook’s terms and also not asking for permission from users.
The Associated Press has already stated many sources in their report that Data Propria are working with Trump’s re-election campaign for 2020. It’s still a bit early to be thinking about a Presidential election, but here we are. Hopefully users are more aware this time around of what is going on and don’t just give up their information very easily.