Cambridge Analytica Scandal: Consequences and Facebook's Response

Organizational behavior 1
Organizational behavior
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Organizational behavior 2
Executive summary.
Facebook was recently hit by a huge scandal that involved the use of personal data by
unauthorized parties. Cambridge Analytica got access to Facebook’s user data which was used
for the purpose of political advertising. However, this act was done without consent according to
Facebook hence bringing about massive consequences to Facebook. In this report, the following
will be addressed in regards to the scandal. They include; the context and consequences of the
failure, organizational behavioral factors that contributed to the problem, what Facebook is doing
to combat the failure and lastly the evaluation and recommendations of Facebook’s initiatives.

Organizational behavior 3
Table of Contents
Executive summary.........................................................................................................................2
Introduction......................................................................................................................................4
The context and consequences of the failure...................................................................................4
Organizational behavioral factors that contributed to the problem.................................................8
SWOT analysis............................................................................................................................9
What Facebook is doing to combat the failure..............................................................................10
Evaluation and recommendations of the initiatives.......................................................................11
Conclusion.....................................................................................................................................11
References......................................................................................................................................13

Organizational behavior 4
Introduction.
The Cambridge Analytica scandal demonstrated a significant failure for Facebook,
mainly in the protection of user data. The scandal involved the harvesting of millions of user
Facebook profiles, specifically for the purpose of political advertising (Polański, 2018, pg. 141).
Nonetheless, the profiles were harvested without consent and caused an uproar among the public.
In addition, Facebook’s stock prices fell, and tighter regulations were implemented on the use of
data. This failure caused Facebook its reputation, and public loyalty to some extent.
The context and consequences of the failure.
Cambridge Analytica is a firm that claims to design and develop psychological profiles of
voters that assist clients in winning elections. Cambridge Analytica was accused of purchasing
Facebook user profiles through a researcher who claimed to be collecting data from Facebook for
academic purposes (Purwanto, Al Husain and Fathullah, 2018, pg. 348). The researcher was
known as Aleksandr Kogan and was a psychology professor teaching at the University of
Cambridge. The professor also owned a company known as Global Science Research by which
data from users was harvested through an app used by the company. According to the Guardian,
Facebook users who gave up their information on Kogan’s app also allowed the app to harvest
their data of their friends.
The scandal, however, happened when Aleksandr Kogan sold the user’s data to
Cambridge Analytica. This breach was however against Facebook’s rules. Before this scandal,
Christopher Wylie, who worked for Cambridge Analytica employee before quitting in 2014,
highlighted that Cambridge Analytica was operating on misappropriated data of about fifty
million Facebook users (Venturini and Rogers, 2019, pg. 7). Wylie also added that the firm was
profiling algorithms that would explore the mental vulnerability of people and then use the