Why One Academic Filed a Claim Against Cambridge Analytica to Get His Own Data

David Carroll, an associate professor of media design at the New School’s Parsons School of Design, paid close attention to how candidates were collecting potential voters’ information online during the 2016 presidential election primary. After all, it’s what he studies.

Parsons, The New School

He noticed that Sen. Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, was using the company Cambridge Analytica to collect data from voters, and that a watchdog group had labeled Cruz’s online practices invasive. So he filed a request to see what data the company had collected on him.

In March 2017, Cambridge Analytica sent Carroll some of his data, including his voter issue profile. The profile chart listed him as, among other things, a “very unlikely Republican” and rated his “Immigration Importance Rank” as eight out of 10.

Now Carroll has filed a disclosure claim against Cambridge Analytica’s branch in Britain to provide him details of how the company gathered a profile of his personal beliefs.

Recent reports that Cambridge Analytica mined data from about 50 million Facebook users and presented President Trump’s election campaign with tools to identify voters’ personalities and influence their behavior has caused privacy concerns. But even before the headlines this week about potentially invasive practices, Cambridge Analytica’s work felt deeply personal for Carroll because this time, it was his personal views being studied, he said.

Carroll spoke with The Chronicle about why he wants his data back. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Q. Tell me how the legal filing came about.

A. My academic area is in the domain of the intersection between advertising, data collection, marketing, media, the privacy issues related to it. Before the election I was trying to warn the industry that this is going to blow up in everyone’s faces eventually. Everything was on my radar, like the fact that Ted Cruz was using Cambridge Analytica was on my radar well before it was a household term. After the election I had a feeling of like, “I think I know what happened. I just have to prove it.”

So I requested the data in January, and I received it in March, and then I posted it to Twitter. And I got the attention of British legal academics who looked at it, and they’re like, “There’s no way this is legal.” That led me to then get a solicitor, Ravi Naik, and he started my case and we filed with the regulator, the Information Commissioner office, in July of last year.

Q. You said that you noticed Ted Cruz was using Cambridge. How did you notice that, and at what point did that seem a little funny to you?

A. I noticed it because I was just following the coverage. Because the sudden new thing that people are fascinated with is how data is used in the political process. There’s plenty of articles that report this.

Another thing that caught my eye — the Online Trust Alliance did a report card of all the campaign ads during the primaries, and they evaluated all the campaigns’ privacy practices and computer-security practices. Ted Cruz got a failing grade. At the time he was using Cambridge Analytica, and the practices that he was doing are equally invasive to what people are all up in arms about with Facebook.

For example, the official Ted Cruz mobile app would automatically send all of your contacts to the mother ship, which is Cambridge Analytica. I was looking at this stuff and I was like, “Wow, this is really invasive.”

Q. What did you talk about with other academics?

A. We were trying to reverse-engineer the practices. We were trying to figure out how it works to be able to theorize on the implications and the effects.

Q. It sounds like regular scholarship, but about stuff that’s happening in real time. It is that correct?

A. Absolutely. And then we realized how significant it was.

Q. At what point did the light bulb go off when you thought, “This is important and maybe terrifying.”

A. Probably when I got my data.

Q. At this point it’s not just scholarship, or happening to someone that’s distant from you. This is deeply personal.

A. It did get personal, right when I saw my data. I’m no longer this abstract subject or data point. It’s personal. It’s me. And it has an intimate portrait of my beliefs and my ideologies. So it was distressing. It was reassuring when fellow academics in the U.K. who were experts in European law were telling me this is not legal. So no wonder it’s distressing.

Q. Where do you go from here with the legal claim, and to study this so it’s well documented for further study?

A. If we get this closure, then we’re going to have answers so we can cut through the misinformation about the company itself. And we can just look at the hard facts and evidence to be useful, to provide that to the government investigators, to journalists, and to fellow academics.

[The claim] also lays the groundwork for a research model of using the laws and using yourself to get information. If you’re willing to get personal, you can get to the truth through the law.

Fernanda Zamudio-Suaréz is a breaking-news reporter. Follow her on Twitter @FernandaZamudio, or email her at fzamudiosuarez@chronicle.com.