Cambridge Analytica’s may deservedly be set apart for its practices and the way it collected data. And 50 MM user’s data sounds like a lot, right?
Now compare to this 2014 report “… one data broker’s database
has information on 1.4 billion consumer transactions and over 700 billion aggregated data elements; another data broker’s database covers one trillion dollars in consumer transactions;
and yet another data broker adds three billion new records each month to its databases. Most importantly, data brokers hold a vast array of information on individual consumers. For example, one of the nine data brokers has 3000 data segments for nearly every U.S. consumer…”
And this was what U.S. Federal Trade Commission found from nine data brokers. In 2014. And by the fact that “Seven of the nine data brokers in the Commission’s study provide data to each other. Accordingly, it would be virtually impossible for a consumer to determine how a data broker obtained his or her data…” this is now far out of reach of any action by Facebook or CA themselves.