> The story about Cambridge Anal. was specifically that they had build a dataset that could infer a lot of information, such as sexual orientation and political

> The story about Cambridge Anal. was specifically that they had build a dataset that could infer a lot of information, such as sexual orientation and political affiliation from a small set of apparently harmless information. Yeah. That story is false. They used magazine subscriptions and car model. Source: talked to the employees. > The chart & data here are average over 40 different worldwide elections. Unless elections cluster around certain dates, the data should be pretty well spread out over the year. I’m fairly confident no political advertising is significant after the election in most of them. The big secret here is that US ads still represent the largest share of Facebook’s market and that commercial markets have a strong yearly pattern. I don’t know how they averaged to get a ratio number, but I would compare years with and without elections. And, yes, elections tend to be around the same date in most countries (except, notoriously, the UK): it doesn’t have to be the same in each country for an aggregated commercial pattern to be prevalent.