By using this application, you consent to the collection and processing of your Facebook profile data, including but not limited to: your public profile, email address, friend list, likes, locations, status updates, and photos. This data will be used for academic research at Cambridge University and may be shared with affiliated third parties including SCL Group and Cambridge Analytica for commercial and political purposes.
You also consent to the collection of data from your Facebook friends' profiles, including their names, likes, locations, birthdays, and other personal information, without requiring their individual consent. Data retention period: indefinite — data will not be deleted even if requested by Facebook or users.
The research data may be used to build psychographic voter profiles for political advertising campaigns in US elections, UK referendums, and elections in developing nations. Global Science Research operates under the supervision of Dr. Aleksandr Kogan, who maintains a parallel appointment at St. Petersburg State University in Russia.
Click the blacked-out sections above to reveal what was actually happening behind the scenes.
While users thought they were taking an innocent personality quiz for academic research, the app was executing one of the largest unauthorized data harvesting operations in history. Here's what happened behind the friendly interface:
~270,000 users were paid $1–$2 via Amazon Mechanical Turk to install the app and complete the personality questionnaire. They clicked "Okay" on the permissions dialog.
For each user, the app silently accessed the profiles of all their Facebook friends — an average of ~300 friends each. These friends never installed the app and never gave consent.
Names, locations, likes, friend networks, birthdays, photos, status updates — all funneled to Global Science Research's servers. The dataset was then sold to Cambridge Analytica, violating Facebook's terms.
Using the OCEAN personality model, CA built detailed psychological profiles predicting political views, fears, persuadability, and emotional triggers for each of the 87 million people.
The profiles were used to micro-target voters with personalized political ads designed to exploit their psychological vulnerabilities — deployed in the 2016 Trump campaign, Brexit referendum, and elections across Africa.