This is How the Ted Cruz Campaign Could Be Mining Your Facebook Data

Presidential candidate Sen Ted Cruz (R-TX) recently leaped ahead to first place in Iowa and second place behind Donald Trump in national polls. The Texas senator may have pulled ahead of the gaggle by mining data on "tens of millions of" Facebook users. The information was reportedly gathered by Cambridge Analytica, a data company working exclusively for Sen Cruz's campaign -- and was obtained largely without the knowledge of Facebook users. Cambridge Analytica recruited Cambridge University researchers to "gather detailed psychological profiles about the US electorate using a massive pool of mainly unwitting US Facebook users built with an online survey."

Cambridge Analytica compiles psychological data by culling Facebook "likes," which it uses to pair user traits with voter data. In 2014, its parent company allegedly worked with Aleksandr Kogan, a professor at Cambridge who used Amazon's crowdsourcing marketplace Mechanical Turk to amass data from a slew of Facebook profiles.The Mechanical Turk users were paid $1 in exchange for taking a survey that would grant access to their profile; this also allowed Kogan to access the profiles of their friends, which vastly increased his data set. That data was then used to construct personality models, which were based on the "big five" traits that make up what is called the OCEAN scale: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. The service Cambridge Analytica provides to politicians like Sen Cruz allows them to "use the OCEAN scale in shaping highly targeted campaign messages," according to the Guardian