In November 2013 a new application went live on Facebook. Called “thisisyourdigitallife”, the app was ostensibly a personality test but, in reality, was much more.

Downloaded about 270,000 times, it asked users questions and gave them answers about their personality. Behind the scenes, it also took the answers and merged them with Facebook profile data – the quid pro quo for using the app – to build psycho-graphic profiles.