THIS week, Advertiser columnist Ruth Wishart reflects on the data scandal surrounding Facebook and Cambridge Analytica.

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We persuade ourselves that it’s all really quaint and quite cuddly.

We pop down to our local hall or school and go into a very temporary booth-type structure, there to be re-acquainted with that state-of-the-polling-art equipment, a pencil anchored to the base by a short piece of string.

Then we place our X, fold up our ballot paper and drop it into a nice secure looking black box. What could possibly go wrong?

Actually, a very great deal. (Not so much with the arcane mode of voting – although that too is under scrutiny. I quite see the need for postal votes for people away or housebound, though there have been many instances of abuse in some English communities in particular. I’m not at all persuaded about online voting since the scope for duplicating votes without adequate protection is huge.)

But the real problem – as recent newspaper and TV investigations have highlighted – is that we have an analogue approach to elections in a highly digitised world. And that digital world has been very ingenious in finding ways to manipulate voting patterns behind the scenes.

You can tell just how very far that can go awry by looking at the build up to the US elections, in particular, and the nature of the man currently with keys to the White House.

The mechanics are scarily simple. You get voter profiles by mining the information we all cheerfully post on our social media accounts.

You construct simple, repetitive messages designed to play to our particular prejudices and fears, and then you bombard us with pre poll messages many of which have a tenuous relationship, if any, with the truth.

But how can they possibly know how I feel and think, say social media users? Not difficult.

Remember all those quizzes you responded to asking what kind of actor you would be, what kind of historical character you most resemble, whether you are a right or left brain person etc.

And think back to the questions they posed in the run up to the verdict they provide.

All designed to elicit information which is used to sell you goods and services, and now, more alarmingly, to sell you candidate A or badmouth candidate B. Or both.

Allegedly these techniques were also deployed in the Brexit referendum, since the financial underpinnings involved in both that referendum and the US election often have the same source.

And that nice Mr Nigel Farage is big buddies with the players involved, not to mention his bromance with Mr Trump.

Of course political parties of all persuasions have long had a practice of trying to identify at whom they should most effectively target their pitch.

But what we’re seeing now is of a different order all together. Essentially people are making a great deal of money by buying and selling private information in order to influence and poison the electoral process.

Doubtless the companies involved will be equally adept at hiding the evidence when the electoral fraud commissioner comes to call.

But just as they know too much about us, we now know a great deal about them. Enough, let’s hope, to dismantle some very shady operations.