Documents and interviews reveal how the now-disgraced political firm targeted potential voters by combining its cache of confidential consumer data with information secretly collected from millions of gun buyers, sporting goods shoppers and others.
This story builds on our prior reporting on how America’s most iconic gun-makers amassed sensitive personal information on hundreds of thousands of customers and turned it over to political operatives.
Electing Trump: In 2016, the gun industry shared data about firearms owners and others with Cambridge Analytica to help elect Donald Trump and keep a Republican majority in the Senate.
Legal Worries: The gun industry and Cambridge tried but failed to get more customer data, records show. One gun seller worried about possible government investigations.
Profiling Gun Owners: Cambridge used the industry’s data to create behavioral profiles of the people who had bought guns and other potential voters and then targeted them with specific ads.
“Why is my information in there?” asked Kathy Gavin, one of millions of people whose data was collected by the gun industry. “Why did you need it or want it? Yes, you could use it to pummel me with postcards, but what else are you doing with it?”
