Who was the whistleblower who exposed the Cambridge Analytica scandal?

Christopher Wylie was the whistleblower whose disclosures helped expose the Cambridge Analytica data scandal.

Wylie had worked with SCL Elections, the political consultancy associated with Cambridge Analytica, and became involved in its data-driven targeting work. In March 2018, he provided documents and detailed accounts to The Guardian and The Observer about the company’s use of Facebook data obtained through researcher Aleksandr Kogan’s app.

The data had been gathered from users and, through the platform’s former access rules, information connected to many of their friends. Wylie said the material was used to build psychological profiles for political advertising. Reports estimated that data connected to as many as 87 million Facebook users had been affected.

His disclosures triggered investigations, parliamentary scrutiny, and intense public debate over privacy, political microtargeting, and Facebook’s oversight of third-party applications. Cambridge Analytica shut down in 2018. Wylie is sometimes confused with Edward Snowden or Chelsea Manning, but those figures exposed different government and military-related disclosures.