Cambridge Analytica is out of business but

where is the data?

A little back fill if you need it:

Cambridge Analytica, a political data firm hired by President Trump’s 2016 election campaign, gained access to private information on more than 50 million Facebook users. The firm offered tools that could identify the personalities of American voters and influence their behavior.

Cambridge has been largely funded by Robert Mercer, the wealthy Republican donor, and Stephen K. Bannon, a former adviser to the president who became an early board member and gave the firm its name. It has pitched its services to potential clients ranging from Mastercard and the New York Yankees to the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The company is out of business…but where is the data? Electronic data is easy to move…easy to replicate…and a database like this is still today, probably pretty valuable. Does it ever really go away?

Cambridge Analytica officials, after denying that they had obtained or used Facebook data, changed their story last week. In a statement to The Times, the company acknowledged that it had acquired the data, though it blamed Dr. Kogan [Aleksandr Kogan, a Russian-American psychology professor at Cambridge University] for violating Facebook’s rules and said it had deleted the information as soon as it learned of the problem two years ago.

But the data, or at least copies, may still exist. The Times was recently able to view a set of raw data from the profiles Cambridge Analytica obtained.

So we’ve been lulled into thinking this issue has been resolved…when in fact it probably hasn’t. What players have this data about Facebook users and how are they using it today?