This review of “The Great Hack” is the first article that Iʼve felt mildly concerned about emailing to my editors. Why am I even using the internet? Why is Twitter open on another tab? Wouldnʼt it be smarter to disconnect, move to the woods and live off the land?

1. 24/07/2019, 1*49 PM‘The Great Hackʼ Review: How Your Data Became a Commodity - The New York Times
Page 1 of 2https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/23/movies/the-great-hack-review.html
‘The Great Hackʼ Review: How Your
Data Became a Commodity
By Ben Kenigsberg July 23, 2019
This review of “The Great Hack” is the first article that Iʼve felt mildly
concerned about emailing to my editors. Why am I even using the
internet? Why is Twitter open on another tab? Wouldnʼt it be smarter to
disconnect, move to the woods and live off the land?
These are some of the questions inspired by the movie, an eye-opening
new documentary from Jehane Noujaim (“Control Room”) and Karim
Amer that explores how our personal data has become a commodity that
is collected, analyzed and then spit back at us in the form of targeted
messaging, with the hope of changing our behavior, as one of the movieʼs
subjects puts it. You can see the movie in theaters or watch it on Netflix,
but if you watch it on Netflix, Netflix might know and then direct you to
other alarming documentaries.
If that seems harmless enough, the film explores how such tactics might
have played a role in the 2016 presidential election. The target is squarely
on Cambridge Analytica, the defunct political data firm backed by the
Republican donor Robert Mercer. According to Brittany Kaiser, a former
Cambridge Analytica executive turned turncoat who emerges as the
documentaryʼs principal figure, the firmʼs strategy was to target voters
whom it called “persuadables” in swing states and then to bombard them
with content supposedly pushing them to vote for Donald J. Trump.
That assertion is one of several unsubstantiated claims in the film. In
2017, The New York Times reported that the “psychographics”
technology that ostensibly set Cambridge apart from other firms remains
unproved, and that Cambridge executives admitted that the technology
had not been used in the Trump campaign.

2. 24/07/2019, 1*49 PM‘The Great Hackʼ Review: How Your Data Became a Commodity - The New York Times
Page 2 of 2https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/23/movies/the-great-hack-review.html
But if the paranoia level could probably withstand a slight reduction,
much of the movie feels utterly credible. Other interviewees include the
journalist Carole Cadwalladr, one of the authors of the collaborative
report by The New York Times, The Guardian and The Observer of
London that exposed how Cambridge Analytica harvested information
from the profiles of more than 50 million Facebook users. David Carroll,
who teaches media design at Parsons, has tried to use the laws in Britain
to obtain whatever information the firm had on him. The whistle-blower
Christopher Wylie, shown testifying before a committee of the British
Parliament, compares cheating in the democratic process to doping in
the Olympics.
But most vexing is Kaiser, whose motives for speaking out — not least to
the filmmakers — are never entirely disentangled. She is shown
luxuriating in a pool “somewhere in Thailand.” A former social-media
worker for Barack Obamaʼs 2008 campaign, she comes across as a
selectively savvy, status-conscious opportunist with flexible politics who
is remorseful for her work with Cambridge Analytica, but only to a point.
(After all, she says, in theory these voters were on the fence. “In the end,”
she says, “theyʼre the ones that go to the ballot box and make their
decision.”)
That Kaiser has turned into an advocate for owning your own data makes
“The Great Hack” seem vaguely uplifting, the story of her education. But
she is still not someone you would trust with your data.
The Great Hack
Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 53 minutes.