Kogan was well-known to Facebook. He had collaborated with its data scientists on a 2013 project in which the company provided data on 57 billion “friendships.” This time, he paid approximately 270,000 people to take a personality quiz. Unknown to these participants, Kogan’s app enabled him to access their Facebook profiles and, on average, the profiles of about 160 of each of the test takers’ friends, “none of whom would have known or had reason to suspect” this invasion. It was a massive rendition operation from which Kogan successfully produced psychological profiles of somewhere between 50 and 87 million Facebook users, data that he then sold to Cambridge Analytica.

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Cap…, loc. 872