Origins

Cambridge Analytica Ltd. was incorporated in Delaware in December 2013 as a subsidiary of the SCL Group (Strategic Communication Laboratories), a British behavioral research firm founded in 1993 that described itself as a “global election management agency.” SCL had spent two decades conducting information operations and psychological influence campaigns for military and political clients worldwide. The new American-facing subsidiary was established by SCL executives Nigel Oakes, Alexander Nix, and Alexander Oakes, with Nix as CEO. Despite being nominally separate, Cambridge Analytica and SCL Elections overlapped so thoroughly in executives and operations that both UK and US government investigations questioned whether the companies were meaningfully distinct.

Funding and Leadership

The Mercer family — hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer and his daughter Rebekah Mercer — invested at least $15 million, according to The New York Times. Steve Bannon, then executive chairman of Breitbart News, served as vice president of Cambridge Analytica’s board. According to whistleblower Christopher Wylie, Bannon drove the firm’s strategic vision: applying military-grade information operations to the American electorate. Bannon was paid more than $125,000 and held an estimated $1–5 million stake (divested April 2017 upon joining the Trump White House). Alexander Nix served as CEO throughout.

Data Harvesting

The collection mechanism was “thisisyourdigitallife,” an app created in 2014 by Aleksandr Kogan, a Cambridge University psychology lecturer operating through his company Global Science Research (GSR). Under a June 2014 contract signed by Nix, GSR would harvest Facebook data, generate personality scores, and match profiles to U.S. voter records. The app was presented as an academic personality quiz. Approximately 270,000 users were paid to install it. The critical exploit was Facebook’s Graph API, which allowed apps to collect not only the installing user’s data but the complete profiles of all their Facebook friends without those friends’ consent. Through this cascading access, data from up to 87 million Facebook users was harvested — including profiles, page likes, locations, and timelines. Kogan had told Facebook the collection was for academic purposes only.

Psychographic Targeting

Cambridge Analytica used the data to build psychographic profiles based on the OCEAN personality model (Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism), claiming it could predict traits from Facebook behavior and craft individually tailored political messages. By December 2015, the firm claimed 5,000 data points on over 220 million Americans.

Campaign Use

The firm’s first major U.S. client was Ted Cruz’s 2016 primary campaign, funded by the Mercers. After Cruz dropped out in May 2016, the Mercers shifted support to Trump and Cambridge Analytica followed. In undercover Channel 4 News footage, Nix boasted the company “ran all of [Trump’s] digital campaign.” Bannon left Cambridge Analytica in August 2016 to become Trump’s campaign chief executive.

Whistleblowing

Christopher Wylie, a Canadian data scientist who helped found Cambridge Analytica and directed research until 2014, went public in March 2018 with The Guardian, The New York Times, and Channel 4 News simultaneously. He described the firm as “Steve Bannon’s psychological warfare tool” and provided receipts, invoices, emails, and a letter from Facebook’s own lawyers acknowledging the data was illegitimately obtained. Initial reports estimated 50 million profiles; Facebook later revised the figure to 87 million.

Aftermath

Facebook was fined $5 billion by the FTC in July 2019 — the largest privacy penalty in U.S. history — and placed under a 20-year settlement order. The UK ICO fined Facebook £500,000.

Cambridge Analytica filed for insolvency on May 1, 2018. In December 2019, the FTC unanimously found the firm violated Section 5 of the FTC Act through deceptive practices. Separate consent orders imposed 20-year restrictions on Nix and Kogan, requiring deletion of all improperly collected data and derived models.

UK Investigation: The ICO raided Cambridge Analytica’s London offices, identified “serious breaches of data protection principles,” and referred directors to the Insolvency Service. The company’s insolvency blocked further fines.

Successor entities emerged: Emerdata Limited was established with former Cambridge Analytica executives and Mercer family members as directors. Former employees also founded Auspex International and Data Propria. The closure ended the brand but not the capabilities or networks.

Accountability Context

The scandal demonstrated how billionaire political donors could weaponize personal data at industrial scale. The Mercers’ $15 million investment purchased a surveillance infrastructure that harvested 87 million people’s private data without consent, processed it through military-derived psychological profiling, and deployed it to microtarget voters with individually crafted propaganda. The scandal exposed fundamental failures in Facebook’s data governance, the inadequacy of privacy regulation, and the vulnerability of democratic processes to data-driven manipulation.