A little-known, baroquely-named voter profiling company called Cambridge Analytica is now at the center of an international scandal. Working first for Ted Cruz's campaign during the 2016 primary, then for Donald Trump's once Cruz finally dropped out, the company harvested the profiles of more than 50 million Facebook users, the largest data breach in Facebook's history.

The details of the story are extremely shady and extremely convoluted. Essentially, any Facebook user who took a certain personality quiz inadvertently opted into giving Cambridge Analytica their user data. And while a jaded person can blame those users for their own bad luck, they also gave Cambridge Analytica access to all of their contacts. After Facebook learned that Cambridge Alanytica had kept all of that data, they ordered the company to delete it. Both The Observer and the New York Times found that they never did.

Equally shady is the company itself and its backers. According to Christopher Wylie, a former contractor turned whistleblower, the leadership at Cambridge Analytica saw themselves as providing weapons and ammunition in the U.S. culture wars. As the New York Times explains:

The firm had secured a $15 million investment from Robert Mercer, the wealthy Republican donor, and wooed his political adviser, Stephen K. Bannon, with the promise of tools that could identify the personalities of American voters and influence their behavior. But it did not have the data to make its new products work.

So the firm harvested private information from the Facebook profiles of more than 50 million users without their permission, according to former Cambridge employees, associates and documents, making it one of the largest data leaks in the social network’s history. The breach allowed the company to exploit the private social media activity of a huge swath of the American electorate, developing techniques that underpinned its work on President Trump’s campaign in 2016.

For their part, Cambridge Analytica insists that they've done nothing wrong and claim to have deleted the data as Facebook requested. But their headaches are only increasing. On Monday, Britain's Channel 4 released video recording of a meeting with the head of the company, Alexander Nix, where Nix is offering to help a potential client by entrapping political opponents through bribery or blackmail.

As The Verge points out, right now there's no evidence that Cambridge Analytica's work did anything to tip the election. So it's important to keep that scope in mind, but Cambridge Analytica still tried to accomplish that by surreptitiously getting people's personal information. Whether or not they accomplished their goal doesn't change that. And in a rare move to hold a giant corporation accountable, Congress is actually demanding that Facebook explain how it allowed this information to be harvested in the first place.

This is yet another boon to people who are still flabbergasted about Trump winning and want something to blame. For anyone would prefer to believe in a shadowy, conspiratorial evil instead of the fact that 26 percent of Americans were just okay voting for him, a shady, conspiratorial data-harvesting firm is a pretty compelling new character.