The Woman Who Knows Everything About You

Brittany Kaiser, the former head of business development at Cambridge Analytica, is out to clear her name and advocate for reform. Seeking a little revenge against the white male establishment is just a bonus.

- Marin Cogan

Brittany Kaiser was a sophomore in college when she got an opportunity she couldn’t pass up. She wasn’t one of those kids who grew up thinking they were destined for politics—she actually wanted to be an archaeologist—but she fell in love with it during high school, after volunteering on Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential campaign. Three years later, when she heard that her home state’s senator was preparing to launch his bid for president, Kaiser knew she wanted in. She submitted a résumé for an internship and, when she got the job, informed her professors at the University of Edinburgh that she was leaving Scotland to return home to Illinois before the end of the semester.

Back in Chicago, the campaign put Kaiser to work on their social media team, helping to set up Barack Obama’s Facebook profile. She uploaded photos, filled out some of his biographical details, and sorted through friend requests from thousands of Americans who wanted to get to know the Democratic challenger. “I remember him coming around one time when I had the Facebook page open,” Kaiser says, “and he goes, ‘Oh! That’s me!’ ”

It was a different era. Facebook’s advertising platform was in its infancy, and it was practically unthinkable that the social networking site would someday find itself at the center of major controversies— one involving a Russian disinformation campaign aimed at electing Donald Trump, and another involving the misuse of private data from millions of Americans by a political consulting firm that worked for his campaign in 2016.

Kaiser has had a unique vantage point from which to view this transformation. Until this January, she was the director of business development for Cambridge Analytica, the same company that was alleged to have exploited Facebook data for political gain.