The project that Cambridge Analytica has allegedly done, which is use people’s Facebook data for micro-targeting, is the primary use case for most data on these platforms. Facebook and Twitter and other platforms make their money through advertising and so there’s an agreement between the user of ‘hey, you will get this amazing product that costs billions of dollars to run and in return we can sell you to advertisers for micro-targeting’.
Aleksandr Kogan (Researcher)