You can’t have failed to notice the news surrounding Cambridge Analytica and its pooling of Facebook data. But what is Cambridge Analytica? Why does it exist? How did it apparently ‘breach’ Facebook and gather the data of tens of millions of profiles?

So far, there is no evidence of a data breach per se —no data was taken which was not publicly available. The word breach has been used somewhat liberally; the headlines could be more accurately described as...