Facebook on Sunday faced a backlash about how it protects user data, as lawmakers demanded that the social media giant explain how a political data firm with ties to President Trump’s 2016 campaign was able to harvest private information from more than 50 million Facebook profiles without the social network’s alerting users.
Calls for greater scrutiny followed reports on Saturday in The New York Times that Cambridge Analytica, a political data firm founded by Steve Bannon and Robert Mercer, the wealthy Republican donor, had used the Facebook data to develop methods that it claimed could identify the personalities of individual American voters and influence their behavior. The firm’s so-called psychographic modeling underpinned its work for the Trump campaign in 2016, though many have questioned the effectiveness of its techniques.
