Clarence Mitchell and Esther McVey - PLUS CM now PR for Cambridge Analytica

Andrew wrote:
Deleted libelellous

Burst wrote:"A source close to the surface..."

Châtelaine wrote:A Dutch expression [omhoogvallen wegens gebrek aan gewicht] would translate more or less like: falling upwards because of lack of weight.

PeterMac wrote:

Burst wrote:"A source close to the surface..."

A source floating on the surface . .

Dee Coy wrote:A resume of McVey's compassionate career is in this link. She's lovely. 

https://skwawkbox.org/2018/01/09/mays-mcvey-appointment-is-a-huge-f-you-to-disabled-people/

Facebook data 'almost useless' for Cambridge Analytica campaigning work, says CA spokesman

 
The data analytics firm that worked with Donald Trump’s election team and the winning Brexit campaign harvested millions of Facebook profiles of US voters, in one of the tech giant’s biggest ever data breaches, and used them to build a powerful software program to predict and influence choices at the ballot box.
A whistleblower has revealed to the Observer how Cambridge Analytica – a company owned by the hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, and headed at the time by Trump’s key adviser Steve Bannon – used personal information taken without authorisation in early 2014 to build a system that could profile individual US voters, in order to target them with personalised political advertisements.
Christopher Wylie, who worked with a Cambridge University academic to obtain the data, told the Observer: “We exploited Facebook to harvest millions of people’s profiles. And built models to exploit what we knew about them and target their inner demons. That was the basis the entire company was built on” ...
Documents seen by the Observer, and confirmed by a Facebook statement, show that by late 2015 the company had found out that information had been harvested on an unprecedented scale. However, at the time it failed to alert users and took only limited steps to recover and secure the private information of more than 50 million individuals ...
The data was collected through an app called thisisyourdigitallife, built by academic Aleksandr Kogan, separately from his work at Cambridge University. Through his company Global Science Research (GSR), in collaboration with Cambridge Analytica, hundreds of thousands of users were paid to take a personality test and agreed to have their data collected for academic use.
However, the app also collected the information of the test-takers’ Facebook friends, leading to the accumulation of a data pool tens of millions-strong. Facebook’s “platform policy” allowed only collection of friends’ data to improve user experience in the app and barred it being sold on or used for advertising. The discovery of the unprecedented data harvesting, and the use to which it was put, raises urgent new questions about Facebook’s role in targeting voters in the US presidential election. It comes only weeks after indictments of 13 Russians by the special counsel Robert Mueller which stated they had used the platform to perpetrate “information warfare” against the US.

MPs question academic who supplied Cambridge Analytica with Facebook data

Facebook data 'almost useless' for Cambridge Analytica campaigning work, says CA spokesman

• Mitchell said Cambridge Analytica did not misuse Facebook data.
  

 
There was no widespread, massive harvesting of Facebook data. It was received by Cambridge Analytica under a perfectly legitimate contract, a non-exclusive contract, and Cambridge Analytica respects data protection responsibilities. It was given assurances by Dr Kogan that the full consent of all of the people he had analysed was there ...
The moment it became clear that Facebook were unhappy, at the end of 2015, the company immediately began to delete that raw data, as per their request, and subsequently did a lot more work to make sure there were no derivatives of back-ups in its systems, and subsequently gave Facebook a certificate to that effect.

• He said that Kogan data had been “almost useless” for campaign purposes.
  

 
The company worked on the Trump campaign, but used much more traditional methods. In actual fact, the irony here is the data at issue turned out to be almost useless. Nor was it used on the Brexit referendum.

• Mitchell defended the decision of Alexander Nix, CEO of Cambridge Analytica until he was suspended recently after the Channel 4 News expose of its methods, not to give evidence to the culture committee. He said that would not be appropriate given that Nix was being investigated by the Information Commissioner’s Office and the Electoral Commission.
  

• He refused to fully defend Nix’s claim that Cambridge Analytica had not worked with Facebook data.
  

AndyB wrote:It seems that our old friend Clarence can't avoid courting controversy

https://twitter.com/carolecadwalla/status/988504174773063680

@carolecadwalla

Hmm. Interesting play, Cambridge Analytica. Press conference announced for tomorrow with their new media advisor: the former Conservative parliamentary candidate for Brighton, Clarence Mitchell. Do remember that they 'never get involved in UK politics' etc etc.