Based on what he was caught saying on camera, in addition to his deputies, and the reporting around their political campaigns in Africa using propaganda that claimed AIDS would come back if so-and-so were elected, it's not a stretch to imagine those people doing everything the can, legally and illegally, to sway an election.
... never underestimate the impact of “just optimizing” something
Sure, they may not be able to deliver super effective results today, few startups in their early days do.
What they’ve identified, though, is that there is a vast market of incredible wealth willing to pay for services like this. CA may have shut down, but Nix turned around and founded another company that does the exact same thing[0].
Keep in mind that these guys also have access to incredible investment money, they don’t have to go out and raise seed rounds, series rounds, etc. These companies are being built in secret, and it’s incredibly short-sighted to write them off for their capabilities today, because if they succeed tomorrow, we’re in really big trouble.
0: https://www.newsweek.com/what-emerdata-scl-group-executives-...
Indeed. There are plenty of companies that would pay a LOT of money to use that data in any meaningful way. It doesn't happen, but people will convince themselves it's important data, enabling a host of dying properties to fool a handful of market actors into getting a profitable exit. The amount of user data leveraged from most acquisitions is basically 0, excepting a few mailings. Conversely, consumer reach (active users) matters a great deal.
I also missed all the bad things that happened because of Cambridge Analytica. Even if we take their extremely dubious claims about their effectiveness at face value them running amok resulted in politicians being better able to target ads. That's not exactly the stuff of nightmares.