Christopher Wylie, the Cambridge Analytica whistleblower, claims that Sophie Schmidt, the daughter of former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, successfully campaigned for The Guardian to scrub her name from one of their bombshell data-abuse stories.
In a memoir that will be published Tuesday, he says that The Guardian’s willingness to back down in the face of Schmidt’s legal threats—and “water down” a story that had already been published—convinced him that he could no longer trust the British newspaper alone to publish his allegations about Cambridge Analytica.
The reporter who wrote the story, Carole Cadwalladr, said it was incredibly difficult for British media organizations to stand up to well-resourced legal threats.
“Schmidt bullied a British newspaper using British privacy laws. It’s extraordinary that the daughter of Eric Schmidt—the man who says that privacy is dead—would be using U.K. privacy laws to get herself taken out of the piece,” she told The Daily Beast.
“News organizations have difficult choices to make, don’t have an endless pot of money, and have to make hard choices. It’s a measure of the difficulty of publishing this work that The Guardian decided they couldn’t defend that one.”
Schmidt was an intern at SCL when Wylie writes that she “introduced Alexander to some of the executives at Palantir.” The New York Times later reported on Schmidt’s alleged suggestion. Palantir, a secretive tech company, was co-founded by Thiel, a Silicon Valley billionaire and major Trump donor, who also sits on the board of Facebook.
Many taxpayer supported school
Districts, including Madison, use Google services.