![]() ![]() ![]() Facebook tightened its hold on user data and has been increasingly asked to answer for all the ways it gave that data away in the first place. The Cambridge Analytica scandal spurred just the kind of privacy awakening in the US that Carroll was seeking. Following a relentless flood of scandals last spring, SCL shuttered and is now going through insolvency proceedings in the UK. Much has changed since David Carroll picked this fight with Goliath. ![]() He could prove why people in the United States, who have no such rights, deserve those same protections. He could offer up a concrete example of how one man’s information-his supermarket punch card, his online shopping habits, his voting patterns-can be bought and sold and weaponized by corporations and even foreign entities trying to influence elections.īut more importantly, he could show what’s possible in countries like the UK where people actually have the right to reclaim some of that power. He could use that trove of information he received to show the world just how powerless Americans are over their privacy. If he lost, Carroll would be on the hook for the opposing team’s legal fees, which he wasn’t quite sure how he’d pay.īut if he won, Carroll believed he could prove an invaluable point. ![]() When he started out, Carroll was an underdog, facing off against a corporation with ties to the president of the United States and backed by billionaire donor Robert Mercer. They said they used these profiles to target people with more persuasive ads, and when President Trump won the White House, they hungrily accepted credit. During the 2016 election, when the firm worked for both the Trump campaign and senator Ted Cruz’s campaign, its leaders bragged openly about having collected thousands of data points to build detailed personality profiles on every adult in the United States. Instead, their crime was defying a government order to hand over all of the data they had ever collected on just one person: David Carroll.įor more than two years, Carroll, a professor of media design at The New School in Manhattan, has been on an obsessive, epically nerdy, and ultimately valuable quest to retrieve his data from Cambridge Analytica. But the company’s guilty plea wasn’t really about all those headlines you’ve seen splattered in the news over the past year. The story of how the data analytics firm and former Trump campaign consultant misappropriated the Facebook data of tens of millions of Americans before the 2016 election is by now well known. This morning, he rolled out of bed at 6 am to news that the parent company of Cambridge Analytica, the now defunct international conglomerate, had pled guilty to criminal charges of disobeying a British data regulator. And on the refrigerator, someone-I suspect the boy-has spelled out the word POOP in multicolored alphabet magnets.įor most everyone in Carroll’s bustling household, today is a morning like any other. There’s a crayon drawing on the coffee table, an intricate toy camping scene set up on the floor. (His wrestling name, he tells me, is Diablo.) Carroll’s wife, Alex, who was unaware a reporter was coming to interview her husband this morning, hurries around picking up the detritus any family of four might leave behind in the morning rush and tucking away product samples from her job as a market researcher. His 5-year-old son darts into the living room in a luchador mask he picked up on the family’s holiday trip to Mexico. His 10-year-old daughter, dressed in polka-dot pants, dips out the front door and off to school, Jansport backpack slung over her shoulders. It’s 8 on a Wednesday morning in January, and David Carroll’s Brooklyn apartment, a sunny, wood-beamed beauty converted from an old sandpaper factory, is buzzing. ![]()
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