I don't know why I don't trust this Christopher Wylie. They way he is pictured, filmed etc. looks over produced, like he is trying to lie to me. I can't put it in words but something is fishy about him. In one of his interviews I found out that CA has sue him, so he did not care about anything, he did something wrong to CA, they sue, he blows the whistle to save his <i></i>*. Is not about "oh, I care so much about the data of millions of people and I can't live any more with the guilt", its about his own skin. If its your own skin that you care about please don't picture in a victim/tormented soul, it makes me hate you just for that.
And that is why you <i>never</i> let such data off your premises in the first place. Who knows how many copies there have been made by now. Remember that AOL stuff that was online for a couple of hours? It will never go away.<p>A pretty good source of very interesting information is the OpenRTB interface to your average advertising bidding platform or company. A couple of bucks and you too could be bidding for ads. If you bid low you will get <i>all</i> the data you could possibly imagine and you can keep it even if you lose the bid. All you need is a good story and a couple of bucks to keep the exchanges satisfied.
What's the point of this article, to try to discredit him? He's already discredited. The whistleblowing doesn't require his trust, it's true or it's not. We already know he's not trustworthy, and surprise, he did it (at least) twice.
In the original whistle-blowing interview the whistle-blower (Wylie) says that he was the one which initiated this whole project:<p>> At 24, he came up with an idea that led to the foundation of a company called Cambridge Analytica<p>> It was Wylie who came up with that idea and oversaw its realisation.<p>> Alexander Nix, then CEO of SCL Elections, made Wylie an offer he couldn’t resist. “He said: ‘We’ll give you total freedom. Experiment. Come and test out all your crazy ideas.’”<p>> But Wylie wasn’t just talking about fashion. He had recently been exposed to a new discipline: “information operations”, which ranks alongside land, sea, air and space in the US military’s doctrine of the “five-dimensional battle space”
I have a sneaking suspicion this guy is a plant or something for the C.I.A. or NSA. The interviews I have heard, he starts to ramble on about Russia, and making bizarre connections. There is such lust for a ward with Russia it is nuts.
I haven't been following this stuff super closely, but hasn't there been ongoing counternarrative of how CA data analysis and its 50 million profiles may not have been very useful, period? Because there's a concurrent (and legitimate) narrative of Facebook's questionable data practices, I've been wondering whether CA has been an overhyped antagonist in our media's rush to find the true villains.<p>Yesterday Drudge Report (still one of our biggest news drivers) had a headline [A] that almost made my eyes roll through the back of my head. It was "WHISTLEBLOWER: FACEBOOK CAN HEAR YOU!" But the linked story [B] contained nothing more than Wylie speculating how it was physically possible for Facebook (and other apps) to do this, but they probably weren't, but if they <i>were</i>, it could lead into some bad shit or something.<p>Yeah, Wylie can't control what linkbaiters write about him. Or what politicians ask him in a public hearing. But because he was a whistleblower about CA's abuse of FB's data, he's been considered an expert/whistleblower in domains far beyond what he actually has experience in. Being a good data analyst and having a bunch of FB scraped data is still not enough to remotely guarantee success in the startup scene.<p>In terms of the election, what's the most substantive discussion/proof that CA and its magic data was any more a game changer than, say, Brad Pascale [0]? And I also haven't read out CA's insights were a gamechanger in boosting the Russians' alleged propaganda and fake news bots schemes. I haven't yet read a better reporter on this angle than the New Yorker's Adrian Chen, and his relative reluctance to blame big data/bot schemes has perhaps made me too skeptical every time I read media stories about CA's magical mind-bending dataset [1].<p>[A] <a href="https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DZVzHctU8AAZBxa.jpg:large" rel="nofollow">https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DZVzHctU8AAZBxa.jpg:large</a><p>[B] <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20180328111429/https://pjmedia.com/trending/cambridge-analytica-whistleblower-facebook-may-listening-home-work/" rel="nofollow">http://web.archive.org/web/20180328111429/https://pjmedia.co...</a><p>[0] <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2018/02/27/trumps-facebook-advertising-advantage-explained/" rel="nofollow">https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2018/02/27/t...</a><p>[1] <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/a-so-called-experts-uneasy-dive-into-the-trump-russia-frenzy" rel="nofollow">https://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/a-so-called-experts-...</a>