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The recent privacy scandal involving Facebook and a political research company has been everywhere around the internet. While it had a big impact on the image of Facebook, Cambridge Analytica suffered even more. The company has just announced it’s going bankrupt in the US and will be closing all its operations in the country.
Cambridge Analytica played a huge role in the Facebook scandal
Cambridge Analytica is a company from London, United Kingdom that does research for political purposes. It became well-known around the world in 2016, when President Trump and his campaign hired the company to collect data on voters. At the beginning of March, it got involved in a heated scandal together with Facebook.
It turns out Cambridge Analytica had been collecting private data on a huge number of Facebook users. Afterwards, they used this data to target ads and other marketing techniques, as well as for other political reasons. What is most worrying here is the fact that users were not aware the company could access their data.
The company will file for bankruptcy in the US
Soon after the scandal, the company said the treatment it had received was highly unfounded. It claimed all the activities it performed were legal, as they are a big part of advertising of any kind. However, Cambridge Analytica still had to deal with the resulting legal issues. If this wasn’t enough, they also lost a huge number of clients soon after the incident.
The company decided to run its own investigations to see what had actually happened. Even if the results didn’t fully blame the officials, it still decided to suspend its CEO. This happened after Alexander Nix claimed to have influenced the outcome of several elections in the world. The practices used were not ethical at all, so Cambridge Analytica did not want to be associated with such people.
The company had to go through a lot in a short period of time, and this greatly affected its activity. As a result, it announced it would file for bankruptcy in the US shortly after stopping all the other operations and activities in the country.
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