The whistleblower from a political consulting firm involved in harvesting data to manipulate social media during the 2016 election, says Americans should be “scared” about the potential degree of online meddling in November.
In an interview with the Washington Post, former Cambridge Analytica director Brittany Kaiser also said she wished she had blown the whistle on the company sooner. Kaiser published a book last year titled “Targeted: The Cambridge Analytica Whistleblower’s Inside Story of How Big Data, Trump, and Facebook Broke Democracy and How It Can Happen Again.” The book detailed her time with the company, which folded after whistleblowers revealed it misused data from some 87 million Facebook users.
“Unfortunately, we’re even worse off than in 2016,” Kaiser said when asked whether history could repeat itself. “There’s now hundreds of Cambridge Analyticas, not one…this stuff changes and gets more advanced every day, so it’s kind of an all-hands-on-deck sort of situation.”
Kaiser released tens of thousands of documents via Twitter earlier this year that showed Cambridge Analytica’s involvement in manipulating elections in more than 60 countries, including Britain, Malaysia, and Brazil.
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