Hi, this is Imran Ahmed, founder and CEO of the Business of Fashion, and welcome to the BOF podcast.

This week, we are going back to Voices.

At Voices, we try to go beyond talking about fashion.

We talk about how fashion fits into the wider world.

And looking back at this past year, we can't discuss the wider

world without addressing the growing power of huge technology companies. Our first speaker was Christopher

Wiley, a social researcher and data scientist who was called the most influential person in

technology in 2018 by Business Insider. As the former director of research for Cambridge Analytica

and SCL group, a UK-based military contractor specializing in information warfare, Christopher

witnessed firsthand how culture, information, and algorithms were being used by militaries,

governments, and companies to undermine elections around the world.

On March 17th, working closely with Christopher as a whistleblower,

explosive stories about Cambridge Analytica's misuse of Facebook data

were published in the Observer and the New York Times,

describing how Cambridge Analytica enabled an unprecedented attack on the U.S. Democratic process during the election of Donald Trump in 2016, by harvesting the Facebook data of up to 87 million people.

The data were then used to micro-target users with political ads and messaging, designed to influence them based on sophisticated psychographic traits,

providing the ability to manipulate behavior by understanding how someone thinks and what they fear.

This story sent shockwaves around the world.

Millions of people deleted their Facebook accounts, and the next day, Facebook's stock price dropped by 7%, wiping $36 billion off the

company's market capitalization. Six weeks later, Cambridge Analytica shut down. After reading more

about Christopher, I was intrigued to learn that he had worked in fashion trend forecasting, and I

wondered what Cambridge Analytica and the fashion industry could possibly share in common.

...