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SM Sandra Matz Professor at Columbia Business School and a computational social scientist who studies how digital data, such as social media activity, can predict and shape be...

“I think Cambridge Analytica looks cute in hindsight now with AI.”

Mostly Human with Laurie Segall · Tech Strategy & Big Tech · September 2026

“I think Cambridge Analytica looks cute in hindsight now with AI.” — Sandra Matz, Mostly Human with Laurie Segall

Context

Matz had just been correcting the record on Cambridge Analytica: it was not a breach, Facebook handed the data over by design. Laurie Segall asks whether the scandal now looks like a warm-up for AI. Matz says the underlying principles have not changed, only the scale, since a model no longer needs someone to assemble the dataset and train on it first.

Listen to the episode → More from Sandra Matz → More Tech Strategy & Big Tech quotes →

Transcript

Mostly Human with Laurie Segall Around 18:05 into the episode
Sandra Matz

…was actually open to developers to grab. And to me, yeah, they did restrict the access after. But again, this is something that when you build technology and you move fast and you break things, well, maybe that's an oversight that happened because they were not responsible enough to start with.

Laurie Segall

…and break things, only like it feels like the stakes are even higher. And that could just be me putting my own point of view on it. But I'm curious how you feel about looking back at that and where we sit now with artificial intelligence and the questions that we're now beginning to ask about it.

Sandra Matz

I think Cambridge Analytica looks cute in hindsight now with AI. I mean, the one thing I remember when I published the book, I was like, oh my God, this is going to be outdated so quickly because technology moves so fast. But at the end of the day, the main principles remain the same. And if anything, I think AI is just accelerating it. And so the challenge that you have with AI that's different today than back in even 2016 is simply scale. So back in 2016…

Laurie Segall

It's one thing I heard some folks talking about, kind of like, you know, in the corners of whatever, like the rise of wearables and AI wearables, like these rings that can listen. Like we're kind of, we're beginning, people are going to start recording everything, whether or not we even realize it.…

Sandra Matz

And it's a great example, because I think what people associate with Cambridge Analytica is, well, I'm just not using social media anymore. It's a comment that I hear almost every time that I give a talk somewhere. It's like someone feels very proud that they're not using social media anymore and…

Laurie Segall

And

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

More from Mostly Human with Laurie Segall

“Email was kind of that through line of like owning your audience and distribution in a time where a lot of other media brands leaned into Google search as being overly dependent on traffic or Facebook and the news feed. And that obviously didn't work out for a lot of those companies who have over-indexed in those channels. And weirdly enough, the least sexy tech of them all, which is like email, is the one that everyone is coming back to as the only way to really own your audience and that distribution.” — Tyler Denk, Mostly Human with Laurie Segall