The Great Hack                 4 ½ stars

This week I return once again to the Sundance releases to find a compelling documentary in The Great Hack.  The film goes into the details of the Cambridge Analytica scandal of 2017 and 2018.  It uses the personal stories of two individuals who got caught up in the scandal involving the Trump campaign, Brexit and many elections around the world.  The British company (named by Steve Bannon of Breitbart) teamed up with Facebook and used the personal data of millions of people to find ways of changing their behavior through the spreading of millions of social network postings to swing elections in favor of their clients.  Their most famous client was of course the Trump Campaign in the election of 2016.  One of their tactics was to get individuals to sign up for an app that provided not only their personal information, but that of their Facebook friends as well.  The film introduces us to David Carroll, a professor who sued Cambridge Analytica to recover his personal data in a case that was heard in the British courts.  The ruling forced the company to comply with Carroll’s wishes which they failed to do, making Cambridge Analylica in effect a criminal enterprise.  The other story told is that of Brittany Kaiser, a one-time director who worked for the company for 3 ½ years in a role that made her very familiar with the practice of data harvesting and using it for the benefit of their clients.  Kaiser became a whistleblower who revealed what she knew in testimonies in Britain and the US.  Cambridge Analytica is now defunct, but the film gives us a stark warning that this practice of gathering our personal data and using it to change our behavior is only going to continue.  The Great Hack makes it clear that it may be a long time before we can have a true free and fair election again.