# Christopher Wylie **Christopher Wylie** (b. June 19, 1989, Victoria, British Columbia) is the data scientist whose March 2018 disclosures to *The Guardian*/*Observer* and *The New York Times* exposed how [[Cambridge Analytica]] had harvested the [[Facebook]] data of some 87 million people to build psychographic voter-targeting models for the [[Robert Mercer]]–[[Steve Bannon]] political operation. The story produced the largest privacy scandal in the history of social media, a record $5 billion [[FTC]] settlement with Facebook (2019), and the collapse of Cambridge Analytica itself. He is in the vault as the source — and, in a smaller way, as an author — of the [[Microtargeting]] apparatus the right built after 2014. ## The work he later blew the whistle on A self-taught coder who left school at 16, Wylie worked for the Liberal Democrats and the Liberal Party of Canada before joining [[SCL Group]]'s elections arm around 2013, drawn by DARPA-funded research on psychological profiling. It was Wylie who brought in the Cambridge academic [[Aleksandr Kogan]], whose personality-quiz app scraped users *and their friends*, and who helped design the model that [[Alexander Nix]] would later sell to the Mercers. He left in 2014 and co-founded Eunoia Technologies with other SCL alumni; parliamentary testimony later established that Eunoia held Kogan's full dataset, which is why critics — and a Queen's Counsel report noting his contract described a part-time intern on a student visa — have contested how far "whistleblower" captures his role. ## The disclosure and after - **March 1, 2018**: gave *The Guardian* a cache of documents. **March 18**: the *Observer* interview by [[Carole Cadwalladr]], who had spent a year on [[Brexit]], [[Vote Leave]] and AggregateIQ, and whom he helped substantiate. **March 27**: testified to the Commons DCMS committee; later to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee. - Named to *Time*'s 100 most influential people (2018). Book: *Mindf\*ck: Inside Cambridge Analytica's Plot to Break the World* (October 2019). - Since December 2018 has worked for the retailer H&M, latterly as head of insight and emerging technologies. Became a British citizen January 24, 2024; lives in London. ## Why he matters here Wylie's account is the origin story the vault uses for data-driven manipulation: that psychographic targeting was a *military* information-operations technique, imported into domestic politics by a defense contractor and financed by a hedge-fund billionaire. His own testimony is also the caution — the technique's effectiveness has never been demonstrated at the scale its sellers claimed, and Cambridge Analytica's real product may have been the belief among clients that it worked. See [[Cambridge Analytica]] for the company's record and [[Political Technology]] for the general form. ## See Also - [[Cambridge Analytica]] · [[SCL Group]] · [[Alexander Nix]] · [[Robert Mercer]] · [[Steve Bannon]] - [[Carole Cadwalladr]] · [[Vote Leave]] · [[Brexit]] - [[Facebook]] · [[Meta]] · [[FTC]] · [[Microtargeting]]