Carole Cadwalladr in The Great Hack (Netflix)

To further enhance this documentary’s timeliness, directors Karim Amer and Jehane Noujaim have added more footage after its Sundance Festival premiere. Even with new interviews added, the film now has a shorter running time. Even though it represents four years of work, it virtually has a “breaking news” chyron running through it, throwing the viewer into the middle of updates as they are unfolding.

Noujaim’s documentary resume features the optimistic impact of changing communication technologies. Startup.com (2001) was present at the rise of internet companies; Control Room (2004) looked at media perceptions of U.S. Mideast policy; and the Oscar-nominated The Square (2013), co-directed with Amer, followed how social media aided hopeful young Egyptian activists to organize anti-government protests.

As with her other films, Noujaim focuses on individual characters winding their way through the larger story. Here, it’s centered on the international personal data scandal that some in the media has described as when “Cambridge Analytica stole from Facebook.” Although references and names whiz by without full explanation or context for those not familiar with the details, the three main individuals profiled are involving guides to some of the legal, ethical, social, and individual ramifications of the film’s theme: personal data is now a commodity more valuable than oil.

David Carroll, associate professor of media design at Parsons School of Design at the New School, leads a class to raise his students’ consciousness on how their own online information has become the basis for the trillion dollar industry that feeds a steady string of content built for and marketed to each individual. He tries to be even more stringent with his young children’s online activities by advising them to always read an app’s terms and conditions before accepting.

Carroll starts wondering what facts technology companies have about him, so he reaches out to other experts on how to find out. They warn him about Project Alamo, a project that spent a million a day on Facebook ads to generate a boasted 5,000 data points on every American voter, supposedly generated through a popular “personality test” that went viral on users’ news feeds.

The data was for Cambridge Analytica—Steve Bannon, as full of himself as he was seen in Alison Klayman’s The Brink earlier this year, chuckles that he was the one who named the company. The experts realize that it has a parent company in the UK, SCL Elections Group, and is therefore subject to the UK’s Data Protection Act to return and delete all of a person’s data on request. Carroll files suit, and the film follows its progress, but SCL thwarts his efforts by declaring bankruptcy.

Carole Cadwalladr is the British investigative reporter whose year-long investigation for The Observer/Guardian, with The New York Times and UK’s Channel 4, discovered Cambridge Analytica’s first whistleblower, pink-haired Christopher Wylie. Wylie’s revelations that the company obtained Facebook profile data from academic research conducted by a university professor, Aleksandr Kogan, led to parliamentary hearings that are covered in the documentary, particularly the testimony of Alexander Nix, former CEO, and Julian Wheatland, former chairman of SCL Group and COO and CFO of the SCL/Cambridge Analytica group of companies. Both minimize Wylie’s work and access to the company’s operations.

Meanwhile, Cadwalladr finds links among leaders in the technology industry with political figures in the Trump and Brexit campaigns. Rebekah Mercer’s name is dropped, without a mention that she and her father, Robert, were the wealthy investors behind Cambridge Analytica, nor that she has set up another data company.

A Burning Man party girl seen in the opening sequence is revealed as another whistleblower, Brittany Kaiser, Cambridge Analytica’s former director of business development. She becomes the focus as the filmmakers follow her from a luxury hotel in Thailand to England to Washington, DC, as she mulls her legal problems. She explains, through company graphics, how Cambridge Analytica targeted “persuadables” in key precincts of the swing states of Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin: “We targeted them on every platform until they saw the world the way we wanted them to.” (She mysteriously says she can’t discuss the Brexit campaign.) Based on my news feed during the 2016 election, I saw a lot of memes with manipulated photographs and dubious claims, so the assumed persuasion wasn’t just through advertisements.

When Kaiser realizes she can download her computer files, including her calendars and audio notes of meetings, she points out how the company marketed its services to democracies around the world, including in Ghana, Kenya, Lithuania, Malaysia, Romania, and Trinidad/Tobago. However, she testifies to the parliamentary committee that the UK government had classified the company’s technology as export-controlled, or, to use the metaphor the film prefers, it was “weapons-grade,” to be controlled by the government.

When Kaiser learns Cadwalladr has found out about a meeting she had with Julian Assange of WikiLeaks and her donation to his group, she becomes really worried about her culpability and tries hard to defend herself on camera. The directors spend considerable time asking her and others to weigh her mixed motives, but no tell-all insider is purely an idealistic do-gooder.

Cambridge Analytica’s use of Facebook data is not the great hack of the title. It’s one example of a bigger story: how our personal data is being used as weapons during elections that the legal system can’t restrain, yet.

Directed by Karim Amer and Jehane Noujaim
Written by Karim Amer, Erin Bernett, and Pedro Kos
Released by Netflix
USA. 113 min. Not Rated