It was recently reported that data has surpassed oil as the most valuable resource on earth. However, as suggested by The Great Hack, Cambridge Analytica was quicker than most to recognise the potential profit in harvesting personal data. Indeed, the company appealed to clients by claiming they could provide 5,000 data points on every single American voter – and, as the documentary goes on to claim, it was able to deliver on this promise through the tried-and-tested method of Facebook personality quizzes.

It’s a format that pretty much anyone who uses Facebook will be familiar with: a seemingly innocuous string of questions, which reveal something unique – or not so unique – about you as an individual. However, there was more to these particular quizzes than first met the eye. Because, using psychological research, including the OCEAN score (which examines five key personality traits: openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism), the folks at CA were able to use the results of these quizzes to build psychographic profiles of social media users.

Even more disturbing? According to The Great Hack, those of us who took such a quiz inadvertently allowed CA to scrape data from our entire friend network (yet another reason to monitor our security settings) and handed them the keys to millions of people’s personal information in the process.

As Facebook CTO Mike Schroepfer confirmed in 2018: “In total, we believe the Facebook information of up to 87 million people – mostly in the US – may have been improperly shared with Cambridge Analytica.”