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Yes We Can (Profile You): a Brief Primer On Campaigns and Political Data
An anonymous reader writes "In the Stanford Law Review Online, Professor Daniel Kreiss discusses 'the history of political data, focusing on the recent proliferation in voter data and development of new voter-modeling techniques,' and how 'these data practices undermine privacy and democratic practice, even as they increase participation and voter turnout.' He writes: 'Underlying all of this is a vast data infrastructure that has made targeted online advertising and marketing possible, and has contributed to a revival of field campaigning over the last decade. Online advertising and field campaigning rely on voter modeling based on hundreds of data points culled from surveys, public records, and commercial information sources such as credit histories. This data details the location, demographics, political affiliations, social networks, behavior, and interests of citizens.'"
The sooner you get over that, the happier you will be. Well wiser anyway. ;-P
Anyone who wants to predict how I personally will vote in the 2012 election (or any election, really) will have an easy enough time doing so -- because I talk about politics all the time, in person and online, and I don't make any effort to keep my views a secret. This isn't a violation of my privacy, because I chose to put that information out there. As far as using demographic data to decide where to focus campaign efforts, politicians have been doing that as long as there have been elections. The methods they use now may be more sophisticated than they used to be, but it's silly to pretend this is something new and dangerous.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
It's like when the census chick came by my place.
She wanted to know all this personal information, but then got all offended when I took my clothes off.
I just don't get it.
Here, I'll help get you started.
I get my most of my news from Europe, specifically the UK and Germany, and the rest of my news from Japan. Our media in the US is a wasteland that isn't worth reading, and hasn't been for at least the last 20 years.
I read slashdot for the comments, prefer the BSD license over GPL, and prefer OSX and *BSD over Windows and Linux. I avoid computers whenever I can, even though I make a living dealing with them.
I watch Formula 1, love sailing, and follow most of the major sailing races. I don't watch movies, or television other than F1. I prefer J-Pop and EDM over anything that gets played on the radio in the US.
I don't care which, if any, god(s) you worship, but would prefer you keep it to yourself and don't try to change my beliefs (exactly what they are or aren't, you don't need to know).
I don't care about climate change, warming or cooling, man-made or natural, because I don't think humankind as a whole is worth saving. Eventually, we'll kill the human race off anyway. Life will go on in some form, somewhere, even if it's reduced to single-celled organisms and has to evolve all over again.
Also, I absolutely hate career politicians of every stripe, and always have. There's a 99.9% chance I won't vote for any of you assholes who make a career in politics. I don't think I'm all that unique, but I hope that helps you figure out which box I fit in.
...that we have the best government that money can buy.
Like in Australia - every person eligible to vote has to enrol and vote. Maybe that would help drown out the extremists?
Coupled with the fact that the USA and Canada don't have democracy (proportional voting + multimember electorates), but have FPP instead, things don't look so rosy.
work in progress
Do you folks know much about CiviCRM? http://civicrm.org/
It is an amazingly powerful free, open-source tool not unlike Salesforce.com. It works well with both Drupal and Joomla, and in fact evolved from Howard Dean's DeanSpace. Doonesbury even made fun of it, back in the day. It really is a great tool for non-nefarious purposes. And also...
You can visit that link, and log into an actual live back-end demo, with you as the admin. This gives you a chance to see how it works and what is there. AFAIK, when Bob Smith wants to run for Senate and starts forming an organisation, which means a CRM-type telephone directory plus donor-tracking and accounting. The Bob Smith Campaign Professionals already know about CiviCRM. I heard Hillary used it for her Presidential campaign to give you an idea. Lots of folks running for office use CiviCRM, but not all of course. I'd like to know what the free open-source alternatives are.
CiviCRM has fields to store anything and everything the Republicans/Democrats want to keep track of. You can keep track of Bob's relations like who his sister is. If she died already. How much Bob has donated money for, maybe he's a subscription member, and what I find most-interesting is they have fields to keep track of most-pressing issues like gun-rights or birth-control.
They Know, and they work hard to keep track.
This is kind of fear mongering "sky is falling" piece that led to SOPA, and is forever being foisted upon us by the left to demonize the right. (You'll note that Obama gets off the hook, while the Republicans are evil for doing more or less the same thing.)
Beyond that, there's a basic intellectual dishonesty and laziness in this piece: It's called "Zip Codes." Virtually every single word, reference and assertion in this piece could have been made about the introduction of zip codes, where it became possible to target specific groups of people, with specific incomes, in specific neighborhoods, and correlate it even more specifically with magazine subscriptions, tax rolls, etc.
Is what this terribly naive professor complaining about in any way different than a politician buying ads in Hispanic publications, religious newspapers, talk radio, or even giving a pro-business speech at the local Rotary Club? Or (in the very old days) showing up at a Union hiring hall to preach fire and brimstone against the corporations who were also funding your campaign? Politicians have always been able to target (and tailor) their messages to specific audiences.
If anything, I'd argue that with the internet, and cell phones, where so many of our eyes are looking at (or recording) many things, it's more difficult than ever to make some incendiary claim and believe it's going to go unnoticed, and get by under the radar. (See: Obama, Barack, "they cling to their guns and religion" targeted specifically at an uber-liberal upper class group of San Francisco donors. We weren't supposed to hear about that, but we did.)
In short, this is poor scholarship that doesn't stand up to any serious vetting. But it's easier to "blame the internet" to gin up all sorts of "woe is me, it's the end of civilization" nonsense.
If I were grading this, I'd give him an F.