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Brittany Kaiser found herself in the eye of a storm when she joined Chris Wylie as a whistleblower in the Cambridge Analytica case back in Spring of 2018 . From being a director of business development in a company focusing on targeting voters through their data , she ’ s now advocating for each individual to own their own data .
By Emilie Kristensen-McLachlan
Before March 2018 most people probably associated the name Cambridge with the top university or perhaps thought of the English ctcity with the historical architecture . But at least for a while that all changed when Chris Wylie , former employee of Cambridge Analytica , became a whistleblower revealing in the British newspaper The Guardian how the data company had exploited and wrongfully acquired people ’ s data to impact elections and referenda . The whole world was watching Chris Wylie tell his story and Brittany Kaiser was one of them .
“ I thought to myself , if everyone is starting to freak out about what Chris Wylie is saying I probably have a lot more information that people are going to be even more upset about ,” Brittany Kaiser says on a video call from the US .
In March 2018 , Brittany Kaiser was just a few months out of employment from Cambridge Analytica and its parent company SCL where she had worked first as a director of program development and since as a business development director through her three and a half years at the company .
Kaiser left her job at Cambridge Analytica in January 2018 . When Chris Wylie came forward , Kaiser still had her work computer and started to look through it to find documents that would put to light some of the links between election campaigns , Cambridge Analytica and Facebook .
“ It was only when Chris Wylie came out and I looked deeply with hindsight into my old company ’ s computer and documents that I realised how bad it was . I hadn ’ t read a lot of the 100,000 emails and documents I had . But when I started to read them I saw how bad it was ,” she says .
She decided to speak out and initially , she collected documents and went to The Guardian but since started working with the British and American state legislators and investigators . According to Kaiser , she has put to light over 100,000 documents that no investigators had had access to before .
“ I also explained to investigators and legislators how these things worked , how we collected data and how it was possibly abused and it was used in elections around the world . Basically how all of this stuff worked because unfortunately a lot of these investigators and legislators didn ’ t actually understand how the technology worked ,” Kaiser says .
Brittany Kaiser calls herself a whistleblower because the evidence she brought to light potentially wouldn ’ t have been made available to investigators and the press otherwise .
“ The topics I brought to light were the ways the data are collected at these companies , the ways that Facebook data in particular were used by companies and the ways in which data are - in my opinion - abused in elections ,” Kaiser says .
Some of the ways the data are used in elections is in voter suppression campaigns and using targeted misinformation .
“ Some of the main questions were about what was done in the Brexit and Trump campaigns and I was able to show all of the proposals , contracts and communications around that ,” Kaiser says .
The Great Campaigner You might know Brittany Kaiser from the Netflix documentary ‘ The Great Hack ’ from 2019 . The documentary explains the methods of Cambridge Analytica and follows the revealing of the company ’ s work , especially on the Trump and Brexit campaigns , and the eventual bankruptcy of the British company .
In the Netflix documentary and when reading more about Kaiser ’ s story it ’ s hard not to question why a young woman with a background in human rights work for NGOs ended up working for a company like Cambridge Analytica and even pitching and drawing up the contract for the Leave . EU campaign .
“ Before I started at Cambridge Analytica I had a background in tech where people were doing good things with data-driven tools . During my time as an intern on the Obama campaign I saw how you could get people to care about politics and policies that would make an impact in their lives through data-driven campaigning ,” Kaiser says .
When she first started at Cambridge Analytica , she says , she thought she was going to learn how to be the best campaigner possible and really figure out how these data-driven tools work and how they can be used . But the longer she was with the company the more red flags she saw :
“ I was the director of business development in charge of working with a client to find out what was possible to do in their country ( in terms of the individual country ’ s legislation , ed .) and try to achieve what they were asking . I spent a lot of time on the phone with lawyers and when the invoices would come in I would get yelled at by my executives saying I was spending too much money on legal advice ,” Kaiser says .
She was slowly realising that the business methods and aims of the company were not okay :
“ I started to think these people were not ethical and only cared about making money ,” Kaiser says .
Using data for good One of Cambridge Analytica ’ s strongest tools was their methodology built on behavioural microtargeting . By collecting thousands of data points on people and using psychological profiling they were able to specifically target the exact people they wanted . For
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