It is not long ago that the name 'Cambridge Analytica' entered many of our vocabularies and we chatted about it in the same way we discuss previously unknown words like 'peloton' during the three weeks of the Olympics, and 'Baumkuchen' during Channel 4's Bake Off. Such words and phrases hijack our personal lexicons, before disappearing on the breeze of the next media-inspired obsession. How soon will we forget 'pangolin' and 'Covid'?
You will recall that in 2018 Cambridge Analytica harvested millions of Facebook users' personal data without consent, predominantly using it for political advertising. The company (... hang on, we are just checking with our lawyers to see if we have to type 'allegedly' here. Nope, they were caught red-handed and are officially 'social devils') sought to sell the data of American voters to political campaigns and ultimately provided assistance and analytics to the Ted Cruz and Donald Trump campaigns. So, its their bloody fault. The company have showed us all the way to use sophisticated data-mining tools to undermine democratic processes which politicians have been undermining all by themselves for the past 1,000 years. (Sorry, I am just being distracted by a text from Sir Kier Starmer; Boris has, it seems, just been seen clambering off a Romanian model at the Holiday Inn in Bloomsbury ...)
Alexander Nix, the former chief executive of Cambridge Analytica, is facing a seven-year ban on holding company directorships under the CDDA. The ban will be announced by the Insolvency Service later today (Thursday 24 September), but they don't want it to steal the headlines from Boris Becker who is in court today answering multiple charges of criminal conduct under his Bankruptcy Order. It is clearly a good day to bury bad people. We will definitely have the news on Boris (Becker) later. Definitely not Boris Johnson (apparently the reports of the sighting of him levering himself off the model was inaccurate. She is Lebanese).
