“The European Commission is drafting an amendment to party funding rules that would ban political groups from profiting from data collection of the sort alleged against Cambridge Analytica. The UK-based company that worked with Donald Trump’s presidential campaign is accused of improperly mining the data of millions of Facebook users”.
“We’re making advertising more transparent to help prevent abuse on Facebook, especially during elections. Today we’re starting to roll out the Ad Archive API, so researchers and journalists can more easily analyze Facebook ads related to politics or issues of national importance”.
“In one particularly brazen example, ads were run promoting both a “Pro-Beyonce Protest Rally” and an “Anti-Beyonce Protest Rally” scheduled for the same time time and place following the controversy over the artist’s performance at the 2016 Super Bowl. The pro-Beyoncé ad was targeted at users designated as having African American behaviors. The anti-Beyoncé ad was targeted narrowly at people who had studied to become a police officer or whose job title matched a list of law enforcement or military titles, including officer, colonel, major general (United States), master sergeant, commander (United States), sergeant, brigadier general, petty officer, chief petty officer, lieutenant commander, squadron leader, 911 dispatcher or rear admiral”.
«The UpGuard Cyber Risk Team can now confirm that a cloud storage repository containing information belonging to LocalBlox, a personal and business data search service, was left publicly accessible, exposing 48 million records of detailed personal information on tens of millions of individuals, gathered and scraped from multiple sources. This data includes names, physical addresses, dates of birth, scraped data from LinkedIn and Facebook, Twitter handles, and more. Ashfaq Rahman, co-founder of LocalBlox, a company that bills itself as the “World’s Most Comprehensive Cross Device Identity Graph on Businesses, Consumers and Geo Audiences,” has confirmed to UpGuard that the exposed information belongs to them».
«Intensive survey research, data modelling and performance-optimising algorithms were used to target 10,000 different ads to different audiences in the months leading up to the election. The ads were viewed billions of times, according to the presentation».