amy clob shire says mark zuckerberg needs to testify before the senate judiciary committee. they always say trust us. it s interesting, facebook obsessing over the word breach. they re saying no no, no, no, it s not a breach, it s not a breach. that s because the data was obtained initially by an allowable way. the personality quizzes are really popular by some of them. most of them are innocent but this particular personality quiz was being used in a way to gather data and that s part of the point of facebook. if nothing s free, it means you re the product. advertisers and campaigns are trying to reach you on facebook.
analytics but that s not enough for politicians in britain and the u.s. they now want to tackle the issue and confront those responsible from facebook. all right let s find out a little bit more about what is going on exactly for that i m now joined by our social media editor jarrett reed tara good to have you with us now we already know that facebook has tons of data and that they use it for multiple purposes including advertising so how does this actually compare to what facebook does anyway well it s different because this would this data was given to third party so a client of facebook that developed an add on to facebook a personality quiz so as we heard if you downloaded this personality quiz you were giving the developers access to your personal profiles anything you might have a locked where you live where you work and as a consequence your friends list as well so as we just heard in that report anything that they had ever lived in with a works or all of their personal preferen
it s even, chris said he saw a table which contained private messages, so you know, it s a kind of vast surveillance tool that has ended up in the hands of this company, and it s just been used in ways that people weren t aware of and can t, you know, see and can t fully understand, and it s just really important that we can get to the bottom of this, we sort of need to know how that information is use . you helped co-write this article in the new york times and in this article it says that this kind of data did help the trump campaign, and you wrote and i m quoting now, just pulling a section from the article, the researchers paid users small sums to take a personality quiz and download an app which would scrape some private information from their profiles and those of their friends, activity that facebook permitted at the time.
order to target voters. that firm denies violating facebook s terms but earlier cnn senior media correspondent brian stelter spoke with our colleague anna cabrera to explain how this happened. cambridge analytica in its infancy who created this personality quiz, it created this app on facebook. listen, i ve done some of these, you ve probably done some of these. most of these are just fine, there s no evil purpose behind them. but in this case, this personality quiz which about 250,000 people took, the data from it was then used by this professor and then handed off to cambridge analytic ka and then used to create profiles of voters. now what s remarkable about this, you start with those 270,000 people, then you connect all their friends and before you know it you have 50 million facebook users s information. that s what was remarkable about using this personality guys and
personal information. joining us now to explain all this is cnn senior media correspondent brian stelter. brian, i think we first need you to kind of explain what the relationships are here, because a lot of nuances. yes. this is a story on the front page of the morning paper. it says something to the effect of a firm that helped the trump campaign exploited facebook data. what does that mean? it starts well before president trump entered the race in 2015. there was a researcher, a professor who went ahead and harvested facebook profiles. a couple hundred thousand people s data was taken by this personality quiz you could fill out. re remember seeing these on facebook a few years ago? you would have to fill on you a few questions and tell you more about yourself. one of the quizzes was a way to get data from users. not just your own data but your friend s data as well. ls all of a sudden this professor had 50 million facebook profiles