1
Approx. 320,000 US voters (‘seeders’) were paid $2-5 to take a detailed personality/ political test that required them to log in with their Facebook account
User’s data
Friend’s data
2
The app also collected data such as likes and personal information from the test-taker’s Facebook account ...
... as well their friends’ data, amounting to over 50m people’s raw Facebook data
3
The personality quiz results were paired with their Facebook data – such as likes – to seek out psychological patterns
4
Algorithms combined the data with other sources such as voter records to create a superior set of records (initially 2m people in 11 key states*), with hundreds of data points per person
These individuals could then be targeted with highly personalised advertising based on their personality data
1
Approx. 32,000 US voters (‘seeders’) were paid $2-5 to take a detailed personality/ political test that required them to log in with their Facebook account
2
The app also collected data such as likes and personal information from the test-taker’s Facebook account, as well their friends’ data, amounting to over 50m people’s raw Facebook data
3
The personality quiz results were paired with their Facebook data – such as likes – to seek out psychological patterns
Friend’s
data
User’s data
4
Algorithms combined the data with other sources such as voter records to create a superior set of records (initially 2m people in 11 key states*), with hundreds of data points per person.
These individuals could then be targeted with highly personalised advertising based on their personality data
1
Approx. 320,000 US voters (‘seeders’) were paid $2-5 to take a detailed personality/ political test that required them to log in with their Facebook account
4
Algorithms combined the data with other sources such as voter records to create a superior set of records (initially 2m people in 11 key states*), with hundreds of data points per person
2
The app also collected data such as likes and personal information from the test-taker’s Facebook account ...
3
The personality quiz results were paired with their Facebook data – such as likes – to seek out psychological patterns
Friends’
data
User’s data
These individuals could then be targeted with highly personalised advertising based on their personality data
... as well their friends’ data, amounting to over 50m people’s raw Facebook data