Mr. Wylies team had a bigger problem. Building psychographic profiles on a national scale required data the company could not gather without huge expense. Traditional analytics firms used voting records and consumer purchase histories to try to predict political beliefs and voting behavior.
Mr. Wylie found a solution at Cambridge Universitys Psychometrics Centre. Researchers there had developed a technique to map personality traits based on what people had liked on Facebook.
When the Psychometrics Centre declined to work with the firm, Mr. Wylie found someone who would: Dr. Kogan, who was then a psychology professor at the university and knew of the techniques. Dr. Kogan built his own app and in June 2014 began harvesting data for Cambridge Analytica.
He ultimately provided over 50 million raw profiles to the firm, Mr. Wylie said, a number confirmed by a company email and a former colleague. Of those, roughly 30 million a number previously reported by The Intercept contained enough information, including places of residence, that the company could match users to other records and build psychographic profiles. Only about 270,000 users those who participated in the survey had consented to having their data harvested.
Mr. Wylie said the Facebook data was the saving grace that let his team deliver the models it had promised the Mercers.
We wanted as much as we could get, he acknowledged. Where it came from, who said we could have it we werent really asking.
By early 2015, Mr. Wylie and more than half his original team of about a dozen people had left the company. Most were liberal-leaning, and had grown disenchanted with working on behalf of the hard-right candidates the Mercer family favored.
