Christopher Wylie

Christopher Wylie (born 19 June 1989) is a Canadian data consultant. He is noted as the whistleblower who released a cache of documents to The Guardian he obtained while he worked at Cambridge Analytica. This prompted the Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal, which triggered multiple government investigations and raised wider concerns about privacy, the unchecked power of Big Tech, and Western democracy's vulnerability to disinformation. Wylie was included in Time magazine's 100 Most Influential People of 2018. He appeared in the 2019 documentary The Great Hack. He is the head of insight and emerging technologies at H&M. Early life and education Wylie was born to parents Kevin Wylie and Joan Carruthers, both physicians. He was raised in Victoria, British Columbia. As a child he was diagnosed with dyslexia and ADHD. After being abused at the age of 6 at the British Columbia Ministry of Education, which the school had tried to conceal, he sued. After a six-year legal battle, winning a settlement of $290,000 at the age of 14. The agency was also forced to overhaul its policies on inclusion and bullying. He left school in 2005 at the age of 16 without a qualification, and when asked about his "probable destiny" on his school leaver's yearbook page, he stated "just another dissociative smear merchant peddling backroom hackery in its purest Machiavellian form". He taught himself to code at age 19. In 2010, at the age of 20, he began studying law at the London School of Economics, graduating with a Bachelor of Laws in 2013, specialising in technology, media and IP law, and being awarded the Dechert Prize for Property Law.