Y’all remember the Cambridge Analytica scandal back in 2018, yeah?

Y’all remember the Cambridge Analytica scandal back in 2018, yeah? The political data analytics firm was implicated in a massive data breach, improperly harvesting personal data from over 87 million Facebook users. 

Recently uncovered by NBC, apparently, Cambridge Analytics was harvesting data as far back as 2015, and Meta knew what was going on. And Facebook was slapped with a $5B fine by the FTC. In March 2018, Cambridge Analytica employee Christopher Wylie revealed the extent of CA's activities in interviews with The Guardian and The New York Times.

According to Wylie, Cambridge Analytica harvested personal information on where users lived and what pages they liked, which helped CA build psychological profiles that analyzed characteristics and personality traits. This data was then deployed in political campaigns to shape opinion and choice. Wylie said: "We exploited Facebook to harvest millions of people's profiles. And built models to exploit what we knew about them and target their inner demons.”

And the Russia connection? That remains of great speculation but a lot points to that distinct possibility. But that’s a story for another day.

This March, two longtime Meta engineers were questioned about how Facebook keeps track of user data. The engineers were questioned during a court hearing as part of a consumer privacy lawsuit centered around the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The transcript of the hearing was only recently unsealed.

One of the engineers, Eugene Zarashaw was asked where the data was, and replied with the quote above, basically “No one knows.” Scary. And as reported in Business Insider, a spokesperson for Meta told Insider it was unsurprising that individual engineers couldn't identify where all the data for a single user was stored across the company's systems. 

What? 

So, where is your data?