Facebook whistleblower pushed data-mining boundaries in Canada: source
OTTAWA — A Canadian data expert who set off an international uproar over the alleged leak of private Facebook user data lost his job years ago in the office of former Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff, in large part because he was pushing a nascent form of the controversial data-harvesting technique, says a former senior party insider.
Christopher Wylie, a 28-year-old originally from British Columbia, has told news outlets of how the inappropriately obtained private information of tens of millions of Facebook users helped political movements score 2016 victories in the U.S. election and the U.K.’s Brexit referendum.
Wylie has said he played a pivotal role in those efforts and maintains his ideas made a key contribution to the creation of Cambridge Analytica, the company at the centre of the data-mining projects.
The outcry has sparked fresh debate about how far political parties should be allowed to go when profiling voters.