Top 100 Quotes & Sayings by Christopher Wylie - Page 2

We should be challenging and reforming our legislation around the world to actually combat hostile actors, whether they're domestic or foreign.

If you look at how much information you put out, even just on your phone, on Facebook, on Google, whatever, you essentially create a clone of yourself online. And that's at the disposal of these large American tech companies.

It weighs on me that I played a pivotal role in setting up a company that I think has done a lot of harm to the democratic process in a lot of countries.

Amazon could also be the next Vogue, the next designer, the next WGSN.

I've been physically assaulted several times in the street. Somebody once pushed me into traffic. I've been followed into gay clubs, for example, where alt-right blogs would send photographers to take pictures of me. That has been not necessarily the easiest to deal with but, again, you start to actually just get used to it.

My real concern is what happens if China becomes the next Cambridge Analytica, what happens if North Korea becomes the next Cambridge Analytica?

I'm not going to be bullied by Facebook.

I've had people say, 'Oh you've made whistleblowing cool.' But it's really not. It's a good thing to do. And it's the right thing to do. But it's arduous and difficult, particularly if you are going up against something that's really powerful and political.

What makes clothing so potent is that people incorporate the fashion that they're wearing into their identity. It becomes part of you and how you show yourself to the world.

I've worked in a lot of elections and it can feel like you're fighting a battle. You get into a mindset of 'we've got to win. If they're doing it, we're going to do it too.'

Speaking out against social media giants like Facebook is intimidating, particularly when I come forward as a whistleblower.

Conscientious people like structure, so for them, a solution to immigration should be orderly, and a wall embodied that.

I am accepting my share of responsibility in what happens with Cambridge Analytica. I think that Facebook should also accept some share of responsibility as to what happened.

It is categorically untrue that Cambridge Analytica has never used Facebook data.

What we're now seeing is that big tech is just like any other industry. When push comes to shove, when it affects profit, they make decisions just like an oil or tobacco company would.

There are not sufficient regulatory frameworks to handle the amount of power that companies like Facebook have, particularly in the United States.

Manipulating an election in a small developing country doesn't have the same sort of ripple effect of electing Donald Trump into the White House.

The work of Cambridge Analytica is not equivalent to traditional marketing. Cambridge Analytica specialized in disinformation, spreading rumors, kompromat, and propaganda.

Before my coming out, as it were, I was very much a private person.

I don't believe in data-driven anything, it's the most stupid phrase. Data should always serve people, people should never serve data.

It's important that people see that you can be a whistleblower and you can be different.

Although the most amount of attention went to what happened in the United States and in Brexit, Cambridge Analytica and its predecessor, SCL Group, worked in countries around the world, particularly in the developing world, to manipulate elections for their clients. So it was global.

Different people choose different clothes and it correlates with their politics.

The power of data is being able to be much more efficient with who you target and who you talk to and what you talk to them about. If you can gain that sort of very surgical efficiency, particularly in elections where you just need one more vote in order to win an election, yeah, absolutely, it can play a very significant role.

I didn't set out to attack Facebook. Facebook has just been incredibly uncooperative. It hasn't respected the role of the media and scrutiny and embraced this scrutiny and worked to improve itself.

Amazon can afford to lose money for years on its fashion offerings. But when, if you're a designer or a retailer, fashion is your bread and butter then you can't.

You are being intentionally monitored so that your unique biases, your anxieties, your weaknesses, your needs, your desires can be quantified in such a way that a company can seek to exploit that for profit.

Rebekah Mercer just wanted stuff to happen. She is a difficult and demanding woman to work for.

The thing that I realized in my journey as a whistleblower... is that the reaction that I got from a lot of law enforcement and regulatory agencies was confusion and bafflement.

If we want to prevent another Cambridge Analytica from happening... that starts with regulating big tech beyond just data protection issues, but also looking at whether or not we want as a society to tolerate manipulative design.

The United States is walking in the same direction as China, we're just allowing private companies to monetize left, right and center. Just because it's not the state doesn't mean that there isn't harmful impacts that could come if you have one or two large companies monitoring or tracking everything you do.

When you work in Kenyan politics, or politics in a lot of African countries, if a deal goes wrong you can pay for it. When you work for senior politicians in a lot of these countries you don't actually make money in the electoral work, you make money in the influence brokering after that.

Elections are zero-sum games. That means that there's always one winner and a lot of losers. If you just get one more vote than the other person, you win that election.

It's important that queer people get visibility, particularly when they look, act, and speak in the way that they're comfortable with.

I didn't fully appreciate the impact of what I helped create until 2016 happened. Very soon after that, I started working for The Guardian, originally as an anonymous source.

Cambridge Analytica sought to identify mental vulnerabilities in voters and worked to exploit them by targeting information designed to activate some of the worst characteristics in people, such as neuroticism, paranoia and racial biases.

At first it was interesting, we worked with the military to identify people susceptible to radicalization, but then Steve Bannon approached us and things changed. We renamed Cambridge Analytica, and we began to approach voters as much as potential terrorists.

For a long time I think journalists and society at large really did drink that Kool-Aid. They bought the message that the tech industry is good and they can do no wrong.

We've never met before and I start telling you how much I love your favorite musicians, how I watch the same TV as you do, etc. You realize the reason I'm so perfect for you is because I spent the last two years going through your photo albums, reading your text messages and talking to your friends. Facebook is that stalker.

Fashion brands are really useful in producing algorithms to find out how people think and how they feel.