<https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/mar/17/cambridge-analytica-year-on-...> It’s a measure of how much has changed in a year that, last month the UK, parliament published an official report that called Facebook “digital gangsters” and said that Britain’s electoral laws no longer worked. It was a report that drew on hours of testimony from Cambridge Analytica directors, Facebook executives and dozens of expert witnesses: 73 in total, of whom MPs had asked 4,350 questions. And its conclusion? That Silicon Valley’s tech platforms were out of control, none more so than Facebook, which it said had treated parliament with “contempt”. And it’s a measure of how much hasn’t changed that this was a news story for just two hours on a Monday morning before the next Westminster drama – the launch of the Independent Group – knocked it off the headline slots. It was a year ago this weekend that the Observer published the first in a series of stories, known as the Cambridge Analytica Files, that led to parliament grappling with these questions. The account of a whistleblower from inside the data analytics firm that had worked in different capacities – the details are still disputed – on the two pivotal campaigns of 2016 that gave us Brexit and Trump. Christopher Wylie, a 28-year-old Canadian and former research director at Cambridge Analytica, revealed how the company had exploited Facebook data harvested from millions of people across the world to profile and target them with political messages and misinformation, without their knowledge or consent. What followed can only be described as a media firestorm. The story made headlines all over the world. In the week after we published Wylie’s interview, Britain’s information commissioner obtained a warrant to enter Cambridge Analytica’s offices and seize its servers. Questions were asked in parliament. Facebook’s share price plunged more than $50bn. It has now fallen well over twice that. The affair raged for months. Cambridge Analytica rode it out, initially, but finally called in the administrators in May. In April Facebook admitted it wasn’t 50 million users who had had their profiles mined, as we had reported, it was actually 87 million users. Mark Zuckerberg was hauled before US congress. And in October the Information Commissioner’s Office fined Facebook its maximum possible penalty – £500,000 (which Facebook is appealing against). When I meet Wylie to discuss the story a year on, I ask if he’s managed to process it all yet – the impact, the fallout, the loss of billions of dollars. “No,” he says. “I mean… how do you fathom a billion dollars? I’ve never seen a billion dollars. I don’t think anybody has. Maybe the US Treasury. But no, I can’t fathom that.” The year has been like a mirage, he says. “A lot of those months didn’t feel real. It felt like being in la-la land.” Wylie became a public figure overnight. And the story triggered what, in many ways, looks like a year of reckoning for the tech industry. Damian Collins, the chair of the Department of Culture, Media and Sport’s 18-month-long fake news inquiry, which delivered last month’s report, described the story’s publication as a “pivotal moment” when “public attitudes and government policy towards the tech companies started to change”. Last week, on the 30th anniversary of the worldwide web, its creator Tim Berners-Lee urged people to stop the “downward plunge” to “a dysfunctional future” that the Cambridge Analytica scandal had helped expose. It was, Berners-Lee said, the moment people realised that “elections had been manipulated using data that they contributed”. The problem is that while the tech companies have been called to account, they haven’t actually been held accountable. In November, after Zuckerberg refused to comply with a summons to parliament to answer questions about Facebook’s role in the scandal, Collins convened an international committee of nine parliaments. Zuckerberg refused to come to that too. [...]