Cambridge Analytica’s Ex-Director Says Company Had Exclusive Rights to Breitbart Data

Brittany Kaiser, the former director of program development at Cambridge Analytica, claimed during a British parliament committee hearing Tuesday that the company had exclusive rights and access to the engagement data of Breitbart, the far-right news outlet formerly run by former Trump campaign manager Steve Bannon.

Kaiser gave written evidence about the arrangement, which allowed the company to re-sell data about what Breitbart users were reading.

In her written statement, Kaiser revealed: “One of Cambridge Analytica’s competitive advantages in the U.S. marketplace in 2016, and a key part of our pitch to Republican clients, was that we had secured exclusive rights to resell Breitbart engagement data. This meant that we had at least some access to what tens of millions of Americans were reading on Breitbart, and could feed this data into our campaign models to help predict resonant issues—and to influence behavior. Breitbart became one of the biggest media platforms in the U.S. in 2016, and its stories often went viral on Facebook.”

“I am not aware of any such agreement or data sharing in relation to Breitbart London, but it would be interesting to know if our US data tracking tags were in place on that UK channel, and whether any data about what stories British people were reading on Breitbart or other websites ever made their way to Leave campaigns,” she wrote.