I'm delighted that Facebook and the Mercers are spending some time in the barrel, and obviously there can never be enough Trump scandals, but I'm having some trouble maintaining a sense of outrage about how Cambridge Analytica gained access to voter data, given how much personal information is obtained by campaigns through similar means, as
The Washington Post notes:
Facebook last week suspended the Trump campaign’s data consultant, Cambridge Analytica, for scraping the data of potentially millions of users without their consent. But thousands of other developers, including the makers of games such as FarmVille and the dating app Tinder, as well as political consultants from President Barack Obama’s 2012 presidential campaign, also siphoned huge amounts of data about users and their friends....
Cambridge Analytica — unlike other firms that access Facebook’s user data — broke Facebook’s rules by obtaining the data under the pretense of academic use. But experts familiar with Facebook’s systems and policies say that the greater problem was that the rules for accessing the social network’s information trove were so loose in the first place....
In 2011, Carol Davidsen, director of data integration and media analytics for Obama for America, built a database of every American voter using the same Facebook developer tool used by Cambridge, known as the social graph API. Any time people used Facebook’s log-in button to sign on to the campaign’s website, the Obama data scientists were able to access their profile as well as their friends’ information....
“We ingested the entire U.S. social graph,” Davidsen said in an interview. “We would ask permission to basically scrape your profile, and also scrape your friends, basically anything that was available to scrape. We scraped it all.”
And as the Pulitzer Center
explained a few years ago, big data also flowed to campaigns via the finance industry:
As Americans increasingly conduct their lives online ... collecting data on Americans’ online purchasing and browsing habits has become a lucrative business. Political campaigning is one industry that is increasingly using this wealth of consumer information to target individual voters with more and more accuracy....
Presidential campaigns — particularly President Barack Obama’s 2008 and 2012 campaigns — have made headlines for their use of technology, but smaller races are also taking advantage of sophisticated targeting opportunities to reach voters in their districts....
“... the big, well-financed presidential campaigns have either collected data themselves or rely on [data] firms like Aristotle or Catalist,” explained Ira Rubinstein, an adjunct professor of law at New York University School of Law and a senior fellow at the Information Law Institute.
... data broker Experian’s website has a category for “Life-Event Triggers” and advertises the company’s ability to predict when individuals are new parents, homeowners or have recently moved.
Data broker Datalogix’s website asks potential customers, “Need to reach pet owners? SUV drivers? Green consumers?” The firm markets more than 700 “segments” of Americans, divided into categories based on their past purchases, demographics and financial data.
We were told that the Obama campaign made much more sophisticated use of technology than his opponents' campaigns did, and many of us thought, "Oh, cool." But part of what that meant was targeting us using our credit card purchases. We "consented" to the use of that information after accepting privacy agreements we never read. If we shrugged that off then, should we be outraged now?
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