Cambridge Analytica co-founder and whistleblower Wylie started a new firm, Eunoia, in 2014 that had the same dataset of 50M+ Facebook users, according to emails
Ryan Mac / BuzzFeed :
Context & Ripple Effects
The whistleblower arc that began with the Guardian's profile of Christopher Wylie has so far centered on Cambridge Analytica's harvesting of 50M+ Facebook profiles — work Wylie says Steve Bannon approved in 2014. This BuzzFeed report, based on emails, adds a wrinkle: Wylie himself started a second firm, Eunoia, that same year, holding what appears to be the same dataset.
That matters because it reframes the scandal from a single bad actor to a shared asset circulating among multiple vehicles founded by the same people — consistent with the picture that later emerged from 100K+ leaked Cambridge Analytica docs describing operations across dozens of countries.
First-order effects
- Facebook's exposure widens: the 50M-profile harvest is no longer attributable to one firm, since emails tie the same dataset to Eunoia alongside Cambridge Analytica.
- Wylie's position as witness gets more complicated — investigators and Facebook now have a second entity he founded to account for, not just his former employer.
Second-order effects
- Cambridge Analytica's defense that the misuse was contained within its own contracts weakens, pushing scrutiny toward the network of firms and clients around the dataset rather than one company's conduct.
- Regulators and litigants pursuing Facebook gain a new thread: if the dataset moved between entities, liability questions extend past the original app-quiz harvesting.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the episode points to political-data operations structured as multiple interchangeable firms drawing on common pools of harvested personal information — an industry shape that regulation targeting single companies would miss.
The trend: Political microtargeting is revealing itself as a networked trade in shared harvested datasets, where the same personal data reappears across successive firms rather than staying inside any one company.