It was a data give-away, a yard sale where every price was free. I'm talking, of course, about the mechanism whereby Cambridge Analytica's partner Aleksandr Kogan captured extensive data on 50 million Americans, by using Facebook's tools as Facebook intended, as Facebook enabled, and as Facebook expressly authorized. But 50 million is nothing. Kogan and Cambridge Analytics captured 50 million profiles by getting 270,000 people to take his "thisismydigitalife" Facebook quiz -- just one app on the Facebook platform. And before the data gusher was finally turned off, Facebook had accumulated 1.5 billion users.

Source: Forbes March 22, 2018 16:41 UTC