The Ethics of Facebook Data Mining for Advertising Purposes Cambridge Analytica was a data analytics and political consulting firm that came to public attention in 2018 for harvesting tens of millions of Facebook user profiles and using them to build models of personality and voting behaviour. A whistle‑blower revealed that CA had worked with an app developed by academic Aleksandr Kogan (via his company, Global Science Research), which collected data not only from test‑takers