> First, Cambridge Analytica [a company that was founded in Steve Bannon's office and counts him as a board member] buys personal data from a range of different sources, like land registries, automotive data, shopping data, bonus cards, club memberships, what magazines you read, what churches you attend. Nix displays the logos of globally active data brokers like Acxiom and Experian—in the US, almost all personal data is for sale. For example, if you want to know where Jewish women live, you can simply buy this information, phone numbers included. Now Cambridge Analytica aggregates this data with the electoral rolls of the Republican party and online data and calculates a Big Five personality profile. Digital footprints suddenly become real people with fears, needs, interests, and residential addresses... Cambridge Analytica also uses, Nix told us, "surveys on social media" and Facebook data.
> The embedded Cambridge Analytica team, apparently only a dozen people, received $100,000 from Trump in July, $250,000 in August, and $5 million in September. According to Nix, the company earned over $15 million overall. (The company is incorporated in the US, where laws regarding the release of personal data are more lax than in European Union countries. Whereas European privacy laws require a person to "opt in" to a release of data, those in the US permit data to be released unless a user "opts out.")
> In the Miami district of Little Haiti, for instance, Trump’s campaign provided inhabitants with news about the failure of the Clinton Foundation following the earthquake in Haiti, in order to keep them from voting for Hillary Clinton. This was one of the goals: to keep potential Clinton voters (which include wavering left-wingers, African-Americans, and young women) away from the ballot box, to “suppress” their vote, as one senior campaign official told Bloomberg in the weeks before the election. These “dark posts”—sponsored news-feed-style ads in Facebook timelines that can only be seen by users with specific profiles—included videos aimed at African-Americans in which Hillary Clinton refers to black men as predators, for example.
(Though, with a grain of salt, it's hard to tell which ad campaigns were optimized by CamAnalytica vs. other data scientists on the team: https://twitter.com/GaryCoby/status/825454953560936451 ... but the type of thinking is the same.)
Regardless of your political leanings, it's clear that the arms race in data for politics has reached a new level. If a party (or niche therein), whose views you fundamentally oppose, builds a data science team, are you morally obligated to try to counteract their efforts by helping to build even better targeting for the candidates and views you support? That statement, it would seem, goes both ways.
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/how-our-likes-hel...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-10-27/inside-th...
> First, Cambridge Analytica [a company that was founded in Steve Bannon's office and counts him as a board member] buys personal data from a range of different sources, like land registries, automotive data, shopping data, bonus cards, club memberships, what magazines you read, what churches you attend. Nix displays the logos of globally active data brokers like Acxiom and Experian—in the US, almost all personal data is for sale. For example, if you want to know where Jewish women live, you can simply buy this information, phone numbers included. Now Cambridge Analytica aggregates this data with the electoral rolls of the Republican party and online data and calculates a Big Five personality profile. Digital footprints suddenly become real people with fears, needs, interests, and residential addresses... Cambridge Analytica also uses, Nix told us, "surveys on social media" and Facebook data.
> The embedded Cambridge Analytica team, apparently only a dozen people, received $100,000 from Trump in July, $250,000 in August, and $5 million in September. According to Nix, the company earned over $15 million overall. (The company is incorporated in the US, where laws regarding the release of personal data are more lax than in European Union countries. Whereas European privacy laws require a person to "opt in" to a release of data, those in the US permit data to be released unless a user "opts out.")
> In the Miami district of Little Haiti, for instance, Trump’s campaign provided inhabitants with news about the failure of the Clinton Foundation following the earthquake in Haiti, in order to keep them from voting for Hillary Clinton. This was one of the goals: to keep potential Clinton voters (which include wavering left-wingers, African-Americans, and young women) away from the ballot box, to “suppress” their vote, as one senior campaign official told Bloomberg in the weeks before the election. These “dark posts”—sponsored news-feed-style ads in Facebook timelines that can only be seen by users with specific profiles—included videos aimed at African-Americans in which Hillary Clinton refers to black men as predators, for example.
(Though, with a grain of salt, it's hard to tell which ad campaigns were optimized by CamAnalytica vs. other data scientists on the team: https://twitter.com/GaryCoby/status/825454953560936451 ... but the type of thinking is the same.)
Regardless of your political leanings, it's clear that the arms race in data for politics has reached a new level. If a party (or niche therein), whose views you fundamentally oppose, builds a data science team, are you morally obligated to try to counteract their efforts by helping to build even better targeting for the candidates and views you support? That statement, it would seem, goes both ways.