This is how data collection influenced the US 2016 Presidential Election:

Cambridge Analytica was a political data collection/analysis company based in London which harvested significant amounts of data from Facebook users without their permission for political advertising.

The scandal: A data scientist at Cambridge University developed an app called ‘This Is Your Digital Life’ in 2013, which encouraged Facebook users to take a personality quiz as part of an academic research project.

An estimated 270,000 people took the quiz, but the nature of Facebook’s design allowed the app to collect the personal information of the people that completed the survey, as well as the information of everyone on their friend’s list.

CA’s algorithms combined data from the surveys with other sources, such as public voter records, to create a superior database with thousands of data points (any given fact or statistic) per person.

This data was used to create psychological profiles of 87 million Facebook users. Intensive survey research, data modelling and performance-optimising algorithms were used to target about 10,000 ads at these users just before the election. This is called psychometric targeting.

Christopher Wylie, a whistleblower who helped found CA, revealed that this enabled the same political claims to be dressed up in different language for different personalities, creating an impression of a candidate who connects with the voter on an emotional level.

This had obvious political implications, particularly for what is known as 'persuadables' that is, voters who's voting intentions were not yet decided.

According to the Federal Election Commission filings, the Trump campaign paid CA $5.9 million to run data operations during the 2016 election. This involved designing targeted digital ads, modelling voter turnout and advice on where to make campaign stops.

While we cannot say that CA is responsible for the election of President Trump, its contribution to his campaign was indeed substantial.

Following this scandal, can elections in the digital era be considered as free and fair?