The Great Hack (2019) on Netflix
NR20191h 54mDocumentary
David Carroll files a complaint to recover the data and profile Cambridge Analytica built on him. In Thailand, Brittany Kaiser weighs going public with what she knows about the firm's work.
- Netflix3.9/5
- IMDb7.0/1025,934 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes85%
Trailer
Plot summary
The SCL Group, a private research and communications company, studied and sought to influence mass behavior, and in 2012 it formed the subsidiary Cambridge Analytica to work on US elections. In 2015 the firm took on Ted Cruz's presidential campaign, gathering Facebook user data for what it called political-voter surveillance. Journalists began reporting the harvesting of millions of accounts without consent, first in The Guardian in December 2015 and then elsewhere, and the story grew into a scandal over social media's role in elections. The documentary moves among people on different sides of it: David Carroll, a professor at Parsons seeking the data and score compiled on him, and Brittany Kaiser, a former business development director now in Thailand, weighing whether to speak publicly about her time at the firm.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Great Hack (2019)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Cambridge Analytica was formed in 2012 as a subsidiary of SCL Group, a private research and strategic communications firm with alleged expertise in psychological operations that carried out military and political work worldwide, including electioneering in the developing world.
- The Guardian journalist Harry Davies first reported Cambridge Analytica's illicit harvesting of personal data in December 2015, writing that the firm worked for US senator Ted Cruz and used data taken from millions of Facebook accounts without their consent.
- Brittany Kaiser, a former director of business development at Cambridge Analytica, confirmed that everything published about the firm's work on the Brexit campaign and Ted Cruz's campaign was true.
