An explosive memoir by Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Brittany Kaiser, The Data Wars pulls back the curtain on the billion dollar data industry, revealing the unsettling truth about how your data is being monetized, the companies that are profiting from your most personal information, how Cambridge Analytica exploited these weaknesses to help elect Donald Trump—and how it could easily happen again in 2020.When Brittany Kaiser first sat down with Alexander Nix, the charismatic head of the UK-based boutique political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica, she believed that personal data—the information collected about you from your smart phone, social media, and online habits—could be a force for good. A budding young professional with four degrees in human rights law and international relations who had worked on Obama’s 2008 campaign, Kaiser had been working in political consulting and studying how data could be used for humanitarian purposes, most notably to prevent genocide. All that changed after she agreed to come on board the rapidly growing team at Cambridge Analytica. What began as an unlikely job hire—Kaiser a liberal minded Democrat working for Cambridge Analytica which was funded by conservative billionaire and eventual Donald Trump patron Robert Mercer—soon became something much more nefarious, as Brittany came to understand the tremendous risks that the unregulated data industry posed to our privacy and our democracy.Now for the first time, Kaiser shares the dramatic and disturbing story of her time at Cambridge Analytica in full, detailing the truth about what went on at Cambridge Analytica, how the company exploited Facebook’s negligent privacy policies and lax US data and privacy laws to manipulate voters, and how it could easily happen again in 2020. Telling the story behind Cambridge Analytica’s rise and fall, Kaiser details how she was brought into the shadow economy of data exploitation, explaining how Cambridge Analytica influenced people’s online behavior by weaponizing their data against them to spread fake news and racist messaging—first in the UK during the runup to the Brexit referendum and then during the 2016 US Presidential election. In the aftermath of the US election as the horrifying reality of what she’d been a part of became increasingly evident, Kaiser made the difficult decision to embrace the truth rather than run from it, leaving her with only one choice: to become the whistle blower. Kaiser decided enough was enough, and risked her career, relationships, and personal safety to alert authorities about Cambridge Analytica’s practices, eventually landing herself as a witness in front of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.Packed with never-before-revealed stories and richly drawn characters, Targeted goes inside the secretive meetings with Trump campaign personnel like Corey Lewandowski, Kelly Anne Conway, and Steve Bannon, detailing the promises Cambridge Analytica made to win their business and the huge personal cost to Kaiser that came with their success. The end result is a cautionary tale with a message that proves vital to our democracy in the runup to the 2020 election. As lawmakers around the country come to terms with the best ways to confront the tech giants like Facebook and Amazon over issues of data privacy, Targeted offers an inside look at the true stakes of these decisions, making the case that action against the data industry is not only justifiable, it is essential to ensuring the long-term safety of our democracy.
