Roger McNamee: Facebook’s ‘business model of converting people’s lives into data is morally wrong’

All summer in No.10, the Prime Minister and his chief adviser Dominic Cummings laid the groundwork for an early election to fix their version of Brexit.

Both know how crucial targeted online adverts will be in that campaign, just as they were in the referendum in 2016 and in Donald Trump’s presidential election.  But how robust are the rules governing the tech giants like Facebook?

Last year this programme, along with the Observer, reported on how political consultancy firm Cambridge Analytica had acquired the Facebook data of 83 million users – a scandal that forced the Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg to apologise to Congress.

One man who worked closely with Zuckerberg as Facebook started out was Roger McNamee. He now profoundly disagrees with how the company is run.

We spoke to him earlier about Data, Democracy and Dirty Tricks, and began by asking when he stopped being a Facebook True Believer.