Cambridge Analytica

Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal shines a light on the murky world of predictive analytics.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Wednesday addressed the concerns arising from a privacy scandal involving a Trump-connected data-mining firm. Zuckerberg said it will ban developers who don’t agree to an audit. An app’s developer will no longer have access to data from people who haven’t used that app in three months. Data will also be generally limited to user names, profile photos and email, unless the developer signs a contract with Facebook and gets user approval.

On a day when our virtual friends wrung their virtual hands about whether to leave Facebook, a thoroughly 21st-century conundrum was hammered home: When your community is a big business, and when a company’s biggest business is your community, things can get very messy. You saw that all day Tuesday as users watched the saga of Cambridge Analytica unfold and contemplated whether the chance that they had been manipulated again — that their data might have been used to influence an election — was, finally, reason enough to bid Facebook goodbye.

U.S. and European officials on Sunday called for Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg to explain how personal information about tens of millions of users ended up in the hands of a data analysis firm that worked for President Trump’s 2016 campaign — without the permission or knowledge of the vast majority of those affected.

A new agreement gives Cambridge Analytica comScore’s television information to achieve better television buying for political and commercial clients.