Brittany Kaiser

Brittany Kaiser is an American international law, diplomacy, and data-driven campaigning professional with global experience. Kaiser’s latest initiative is the Own Your Data Foundation, a non-profit foundation that is implementing programs that democratize digital intelligence education and create measurable social impact.

She is also the Co-Founder of the Digital Asset Trade Association (DATA), a non-profit lobbying firm advancing legislative reform protecting the rights of individuals to control their own digital assets. Brittany Kaiser is the former business development director for Cambridge Analytica which collapsed after details of its misuse of Facebook data were revealed to have potentially impacted voting in the UK Brexit referendum and the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Kaiser testified about her involvement in the work of Cambridge Analytica before the UK Parliament and in private before the Mueller Investigation.
 

Brittany Kaiser is an American international law, diplomacy, and data-driven campaigning professional with global experience. Kaiser’s latest initiative is the Own Your Data Foundation, a non-profit foundation that is implementing programs that democratize digital intelligence education and create measurable social impact.

She is also the Co-Founder of the Digital Asset Trade Association (DATA), a non-profit lobbying firm advancing legislative reform protecting the rights of individuals to control their own digital assets. Brittany Kaiser is the former business development director for Cambridge Analytica which collapsed after details of its misuse of Facebook data were revealed to have potentially impacted voting in the UK Brexit referendum and the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Kaiser testified about her involvement in the work of Cambridge Analytica before the UK Parliament and in private before the Mueller Investigation.

Kaiser was born in Houston and grew up in Lincoln Park on the North Side of Chicago. Her father worked in real estate development and her mother worked for Enron. Kaiser attended elementary school in Chicago until she moved to attend Phillips Academy Andover in 2005, then went on to study at the University of Edinburgh, the City University of Hong Kong, the University of London’s Birkbeck College, and earned certificates of study at the World Bank Institute and US Institute of Peace. She later obtained her Doctor of Philosophy from Middlesex University.

While she was studying at the University of Edinburgh, Kaiser took time off to work on Barack Obama’s media team during his presidential campaign in 2007. She also worked for Amnesty International as a lobbyist appealing for an end to crimes against humanity. Between February 2015 and January 2018, Kaiser worked full-time for the SCL Group, the parent company of Cambridge Analytica, as director of business development. During her time at Cambridge Analytica, Kaiser worked under senior management, including CEO Alexander Nix.

Following the Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal, Kaiser fled to Thailand. She later testified before the British Parliament about Cambridge Analytica and privacy threats posed by Facebook. In April 2018, Kaiser started a Facebook campaign appealing for transparency, called #OwnYourData.

Kaiser is one of the subjects of the Netflix documentary The Great Hack, talking about her work with Cambridge Analytica. The documentary provides details about how Cambridge Analytica used data brokers and an online app to accumulate information on tens of millions of Facebook users, gathering data on a massive scale. Kaiser’s memoir, Targeted: The Cambridge Analytica Whistleblower’s Inside Story of How Big Data, Trump, and Facebook Broke Democracy and How It Can Happen Again, was published by Harper in October 2019.

In an interview with the BBC, Kaiser said she wanted Facebook to ban political advertising. In June 2019, Kaiser was appointed to the advisory board of Phunware, a tech company that collects the smartphone location and user data of potential voters for the Trump 2020 Campaign. Kaiser wrote a book in 2019 titled, Targeted: My Inside Story of Cambridge Analytica and How Trump and Facebook Broke Democracy. The book details how companies are illegally using data to influence people’s choices. On New Year’s Day 2020, Kaiser began to release internal documents from Cambridge Analytica links to material on elections in Brazil, Kenya, and Malaysia.

A year after the scandal, she now spearheads the Change.org campaign #OwnYourData which seeks to give control back to social media users and is now focused on legislative reform for digital assets such as personal data and tokens on the blockchain through the company she co-founded called Digital Asset Trade Association (DATA). Brittany has also penned a book she named Targeted. It goes inside the secretive meetings with Trump campaign personnel and details the promises Cambridge Analytica made to win. Throughout the book, Kaiser makes the case for regulation, arguing that legal oversight of the data industry is not only justifiable but essential to ensuring the long-term safety of our democracy.
 

In a recent interview on citiesabc, Brittany said:

“I definitely think that one of the biggest problems when protecting our data rights is the lack of digital literacy around the world. Most of us grew up taking basic computer classes. We weren’t told basic cybersecurity measures like avoiding creating a password based on our birthday.

Lest of all, we weren’t told that every single thing that we do when we use a computer is recorded and then sold and traded to different organizations all around the world without our explicit informed consent. So the education system needs to change in order to solve all these system problems. That is why I started the “Own Your Data” foundation last year, to promote digital literacy and education through the Digital Intelligence Quotient (DQ) standard.”