The Great Hack: L'Affaire Cambridge Analytica

This documentary is a fascinating account of The Facebook/Cambridge Analytica data scandal.

In early 2018, Cambridge Analytica became a household name. The company had exploited the personal data of millions of Facebook users, without their knowledge or consent, and used it for political propaganda.

At a running time of almost two hours, The Great Hack is overlong, but it remains a largely engrossing watch.

The story of the notorious and now defunct Cambridge Analytica is told through the eyes of those who uncovered the scandal, and some of its former employees. One of the film's best features is the way in which it renders invisible data exploitation visible, by giving shape and colour to the 2.5 quintillion data points we produce every day. Understanding how this data is collected, shared and (mis)used is difficult for most of us to comprehend, but the Great Hack does a good job of visualising it.

The Great Hack spends a lot of time - perhaps too much time - with Brittany Kaiser, the former business development director for Cambridge Analytica. She spoke out days after the Guardian reported her alleged involvement in a smear campaign in the Nigerian 2015 election, but this context of Kaiser's decision to go public, and other key details about her complicated story are not covered. She is actually a far more ambiguous character than she appears to be in the documentary.

Through Kaiser, and previously unreleased files and recordings, The Great Hack gets into details of how Cambridge Analytica operated. In one of the film's most convincing scenes, we learn how SCL Elections, Cambridge Analytica's parent company, engineered a grassroots youth movement in Trinidad and Tobago to "increase apathy" so that young Afro-Caribbeans would not vote. This highlights a theme that often got lost in the midst of a scandal that focussed primarily on the company's involvement in the 2016 US presidential election and the Brexit referendum - which is that countries with fewer laws and protections often serve as testing grounds for the worst practices by companies.

In one scene Kaiser discusses a PowerPoint slide that shows all the different data sources the company has used. Next to Facebook, we see the logo of data broker Acxiom. It is in moments like these, that the Great Hack hints at, but fails to explain exactly how the story of a single company links to a broader narrative about a systemic and looming threat - and the importance of enforceable data rights in addressing this challenge.

This film isn't about who won, it's how they won, it's not about who is using yiur data, it's the fact that they are. It's about data rights, not the right, not the left.....come on folks of IMDb you are cleverer than this. It's an important movie so watch it again.

I believe a lot of people could not follow with the whole cambridge analytica case. Mostly because of how many articles were written about it and you had to read all of them to understand it completely. The documentary however contained all the information of all the articles into an entertaining, exciting documentary that only lasted 2 hours but felt like only 1.

Read the critical reviews here and ask yourself to what use we have put the hyper powerful computing power ,infinite memory storage and vast amounts of OUR DATA controlled by , literally, a handful of people. Granted it's mostly for commerce, selling us stuff, until it becomes selling our data to people or entities who clearly don't have our best interests in mind or at heart. And this handful of people cares not one wit to whom they are selling our data or what their ultimate aims might be. ??? leftist propaganda??? One need only look at the decidedly anti democratic trends sweeping the globe to understand how powerful the manipulation of people through the use of the data they surrender, either willing or not is. This film attempts to illuminate the dangers of weaponizing our data and using it against us to undermine democracy and how vulnerable we are to that sort of manipulation. There are real world consequences , Myanmar for one and those are bloody consequences. Propaganda is certainly the familiar domain of the fascists who currently hold sway. across the globe. Despite what the reviews on offer here proclaim this film is hardly propaganda , far from it.

After seeing this I'm thinking that I might want to close my Facebook account. We live in a crazy world these days where people will do just about anything to survive wth using social media for data mining and anything. All part of the bigger design for us to see ourselves more clearly I'm starting to think and perhaps good for a reorganization of how we do things but it will probably get more crazier before it gets saner. I suggest rather than making an opinion to watch this title based on the reviews you see on imdb and Rotten Tomatoes, go watch it for yourself and come up with your own opinions. . .we now know that many reviews are put out by bots and paid writers so it's hard to get what's real these days. The only way is for one to start thinking for themselves rather than just believing what others say or social media says. You'll find all the answers inside.