This week, Cambridge Analytica announced that it, along with SCL Elections, the UK entity owned by the former CEO Alexander Nix, was shutting down over mounting legal fees and what it described as a “siege of media coverage” that drove away “virtually all of the company’s customers and suppliers”. The company – which was created with an initial $15m investment from the hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer – maintains it has done nothing wrong and has been killed by negative PR. No announcement has been made about the fate of the parent company, SCL Group, a UK defence contractor which has been in business for 30 years.
The beginning of the end for the data analytics firm was on Saturday 17 March, when the Observer and the New York Times published interviews with the whistleblower Christopher Wylie.This followed more than a year’s worth of reporting on the company by the Observer. The first piece, in February last year, triggered two legal investigations, both of which are continuing: one by the Electoral Commission into what work the company did for Nigel Farage’s Leave.EU campaign and whether it had been properly declared, and the other by the Information Commissioner’s Office, which also announced a wider inquiry into the use of data in politics.
Wylie detailed how the software program at the heart of Cambridge Analytica was created, and how the company collected the data of tens of millions of Facebook users for commercial use, in violation of the social media giant’s own rules.
