Fans of political dramas will be thrilled by the news that they will also have a Ron Howard-produced biopic of Chris Wylie – “the young gay visionary who created Cambridge Analytica” – to look forward to following Channel 4’s Brexit drama next month. Ron’s blurb says he’s setting out to tell the “true story of Chris Wylie”, Guido thought he would give Ron a little help with piecing some more of the facts together:

As Guido detailed last month, far from turning his back on illicit data activities after leaving Cambridge Analytica, Chris Wylie was busy attempting to flog the “psychographic microtargeting” services of his own company Eunoia Technologies to all and sundry, with little success. Wylie’s snake oil had already been turned down by Donald Trump and the Remain campaign before his pitch to Dominic Cummings flopped too…

Given this litany of failed attempts to monetise his dubious data practices, Damian Collins won’t have been too surprised when Wylie told him at the DCMS Committee on 27^th March this year that he hadn’t “been able to benefit” himself from using the data on other projects outside Cambridge Analytica. Not for want of trying…

“I didn’t do any contracts or any, you know, work with that data… I haven’t worked with any clients that data was used for… that data got deleted, I believe, in 2015 on my end.”

Yet Wylie was still trying to peddle his voter-targeting techniques to Cummings in January 2016, and Facebook said that Wylie didn’t certify to them that he had deleted the data until August 2016. The 2015 date is almost certainly wrong…

And just one week before his appearance at the DCMS Committee, a major story broke in Wylie’s native Canada that in 2016 Justin Trudeau’s ruling Liberal Party had awarded a C$100,000 (£58,000) contract – to Chris Wylie and Eunoia Technologies. Somehow Carole Cadwalladr’s prize-winning investigative skills entirely missed that one…

After media pressure in Canada, Trudeau’s Liberal Party was forced to release a statement confirming that Wylie’s firm had received C$100,000 of Canadian taxpayers’ money to conduct a “pilot project” for the party’s research bureau, including “setting up social media monitoring tools” and to “design and organize several national samples of Canadians to explore responses to Government policy priorities and other issues of national importance”. Which sounds remarkably similar to the psychological voter profiling and micro-targeting techniques Wylie was trying to tout elsewhere…

• Was Wylie being straight with Collins when he told him he hadn’t “worked with any clients” or done “any contracts” with the data?
• Was Wylie being straight with the Canadian Parliament when he told them his work hadn’t involved any targeting of voters, despite Liberal Party insiders saying that he had been trying to push micro-targeting techniques to the party for almost a decade?
• Was Carole completely unaware of any of this as she was busy lionising him in the British press?

In fact, in his failed pitch to Vote Leave, Wylie told Cummings: “some of us will be in Ottowa this month working on a similar project for a major Canadian political party”. Wylie’s proposal to Cummings detailed a number of a data crimes he planned to commit including for his company to retain psychographic algorithms based on Vote Leave’s data “for future commercial applications”. Did Wylie’s work for Trudeau’s party involve “similar” breaches of data protection laws?

These are serious questions for Damian Collins, the ICO and the British media to ask. By his own admission, if Wylie did any work for clients using models built using the Facebook data, even if it wasn’t directly using the data itself, he is guilty of openly misleading Parliament. At least he didn’t walk away entirely empty-handed after all his hard work obtaining the illicit data in the first place…

See also:

• The Other Cambridge Analytica: Whistleblower Wylie’s own dodgy data dealings
• Observer’s whistleblower personally offered to harvest data for Vote Leave
• Ex-LibDem colleagues raise doubts over “Walter Mitty” Observer whistleblower

N.B. Wylie might try to use the excuse that he was not misleading anyone as he did not use the Facebook data set directly in the work Eunoia did. Except Wylie himself has already attacked Cambridge Analytica specifically for trying to use the same excuse regarding their work for the Trump campaign. This is technical but important:

“The basis of all CA models, including political affiliation and turnout models, were originally trained using the Facebook derived GSR data. Even if Facebook data itself was not used directly on the Trump campaign, the algorithms were still built using Facebook derivatives.”

In effect, Wylie is saying that using any model created using the personal data should be considered no different to having used the original personal data. For instance, an algorithm generated using illicit US Facebook users’ data but then generalised to apply to an entirely separate set of Facebook users in Canada…

The ICO’s report confirms that they are still pursuing the deletion of all the Facebook data and its derivatives. “Derivatives” specifically include any secondary models and algorithms Wylie and Eunoia may have also built with the data. Has the ICO been able to determine whether Wylie did create any such algorithms – and if so, whether they have been deleted too?