The Great Hack
Netflix documentary tracing the Cambridge Analytica scandal through Brittany Kaiser, David Carroll and Carole Cadwalladr, on how psychometric ad targeting was deployed at political scale.
- Directors
- Karim Amer, Jehane Noujaim
- Released
- 2019
- Writers
- Karim Amer, Erin Barnett, Pedro Kos
- Runtime
- 114 min
- Language
- English
Available on
Watch this if
Anyone teaching disinformation, ad-tech, election interference, or data brokers. Strong primer on psychometric targeting at scale and on the regulatory aftermath of the Facebook data leak.
Skip this if
Specialists wanting deeper data-protection analysis or full Brexit / 2016 forensics. The film hits the highlights and stays at audience-accessible depth; the real ledger is bigger.
Key takeaways
- Behavioural microtargeting is a security topic, not just a marketing one; the attack surface is the consumer, the payload is content.
- Brittany Kaiser is an unreliable but generative source; the film's choice to anchor on her is its strongest narrative move and its most contestable journalistic one.
- Article 80 of the GDPR (David Carroll's data-access fight) is the legal subplot that quietly does most of the public-policy work in the film.
Notes
Pair with Zuboff's The Age of Surveillance Capitalism for the theoretical frame and with the Information Commissioner's Office final report on Cambridge Analytica for the legal record. Useful primer to assign before any conversation about "data ethics" with a non-technical executive team. The film's flatter moments are when it tries to dramatize Kaiser's redemption; mute those and the briefing intact.