The United Kingdom's Information Commissioner Office has completed its investigation into the 700 terabytes of data and 300,000 documents in collected from SCL Group (formerly Strategic Communication Laboratories) Cambridge Analytica, the "psychographic" data mining company that played a major rule in helping conservative political interests manipulate Facebook data ahead of the US presidential election and Brexit votes in 2016. — Read the rest

“Facebook’s default settings facilitated the disclosure of personal information, including sensitive information, at the expense of privacy.”

Since New Year's Day, @hindsightfiles has been tweeting a steady stream of links to leaked Cambridge Analytica documents revealing the company's work on election manipulation for candidates around the world, including Malaysia, Kenya and Brazil — 100,000+ documents relating to 68 countries, which @hindsightfiles has pledged to release in the coming months.

Of course they announced it at the end of the day on Friday, that's what you do with bad news.

The "business analytics" firm Mixpanel has released its figures estimating the total usage of Facebook (liking, sharing and posting) since the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke; they showed usage falling off 10% in the first month following from the news of the scandal, and continuing to fall, with overall usage down by 20% since April 2018.

“The general public itself has little or no interest in this Document that could warrant exposing Facebook to the risks that would inevitably accompany disclosure.” — Facebook

EU privacy rules force European companies to surrender data they hold on anyone, anywhere; and that includes SCL Elections, which owned Cambridge Analytica, the notorious Facebook data-miner and election-manipulator that extravagantly claimed to have won the election for Donald Trump.

The United States Senate Intelligence Committee is "pursuing a wide-ranging investigation" into ex-White House adviser Steve Bannon's activities during the 2016 election, Reuters reports, and looking into what possible co-conspirators George Papadopoulos and Carter Page had to do with those activities. — Read the rest

A group of Facebook users who claim their personal data was misused, possibly to throw the 2016 U.S. Presidential election to Donald Trump, must wait until September to try and get more information from 'dark data' firm Cambridge Analytica.

The Facebook data set on tens of millions of Americans that was gathered for Cambridge Analytica was accessed from within Russia, British MP Damian Collins today told CNN. — Read the rest

Another shady data company emerges from the ashes of Cambridge Analytica. It's fronted by a man who, in an undercover documentary, once boasted of Cambridge Analytica's links to government intelligence agencies. And the new company has already won a contract in an unnamed African state, the FT reports. — Read the rest

Randy Lubin writes, "Earlier this year I teamed up with Scout.ai to design Machine Learning President, a simulation game to help pro-democracy folks think about the impact of technology on politics. Somehow a copy got in the hands of the Mercer family (previously) and, earlier today, the New Yorker covered it. — Read the rest

Cambridge Analytica declared bankruptcy last month, but it's not like all its evil masterminds joined a Buddhist monastery — they've started a new company Data Propria, helmed by Cambridge Analytica alum Matt Oczkowski, who bragged in public that he and Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale were "doing the president's work for 2020."

A former executive from the data-mining dark operator Cambridge Analytica 'visited Julian Assange in February last year and told friends it was to discuss what happened during the US election,' the Guardian reported today.

Brittany Kaiser worked as a director there until not long ago, and is reported "to have channelled cryptocurrency payments and donations to WikiLeaks." — Read the rest

Cambridge Analytica may be out of business thanks to bad publicity, but "Emerdata" is a new company, whose board includes the daughters of Robert Mercer, who bankrolled Cambridge Analytica; disgraced former Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix is on its board of directors, and much of Cambridge Analytica's C-suite has packed up their desks and moved into the Emerdata offices.

Cambridge Analytica, the firm that consulted on Trump's 2016 campaign and mined the data of 87 million Facebook users without their permission, has shut its doors. Same goes for the company's UK counterpart SCL. From Wired:

The decision to close the company's doors internationally was announced to employees during a town hall meeting in the firm's New York City offices Wednesday.

The Cambridge Analytica affair wiped billions off of Facebook's valuation and prompted millions of users to #DeleteFacebook, but inevitably, the company bounced back, reporting high earnings in its quarterly investor disclosures.

Brittany Kaiser is an ex-Cambridge Analytica employee who gave written testimony and answered questions at the UK Parliament this week in which she revealed that the Facebook apps that Cambridge Analytica used to covertly gain access to millions of users' data went far beyond the ones disclosed to date, and that the number of total users implicated is "much greater than 87 million."

Cambridge Analytica, the British consultancy firm founded by Steve Bannon and Robert Mercer, and whose CEO, Alexander Nix (pictured above), was secretly recorded boasting about using bribes and covert prostitution strings to blackmail candidates, tweeted that it has "instructed our lawyers to send letters to news media who have been covering this story, advising them not to repeat false and unfounded allegations as fact." — Read the rest

Buried in Facebook's latest message to 87,000,000 users who had their data stolen by Cambridge Analytica is this eye-popping nugget: "A small number of people who logged into 'This Is Your Digital Life' also shared their own News Feed, timeline, posts and messages which may have included posts and messages from you."