Pols Blur Line Between Data Mining, Cyberstalking

theodp writes "Mother Jones reports on Obama's Digital Gurus, the top-secret team of analytics engineers and scientists led by hipster CTO Harper Reed who work on text analytics, social network/media analysis, web personalization, computational advertising, and online experiments & testing from the campaign's Chicago HQ and satellite offices. For OFA (Obama for America), writes Tim Murphy, there is no such thing as Too Much Information. 'In terms of just the sheer amount of data that political candidates have on you,' says UNC Prof Daniel Kreiss, 'I think everyone finds it creepy.' Still playing catch-up to OFA in its data efforts is Team Romney, which reportedly hired former employees from places like Google Analytics, Apple, Ominture, and Overstock.com in an attempt to reverse engineer the Obama campaign's strategy."

Comments

Re:FISRT

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, that should have said FIST. Because Barack Obama is fisting my asshole.

Re:What are they using this data for?

[PopeRatzo]

Which is why the secret vote has been important, and will continue to be important.

How do you expect to have "secret voting" when Mitt Romney's son holds an equity interest in a company that makes voting machines (a company which has donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Romney campaign).

We've outsourced our elections.

There have already been elections for offices as high as governor (for sure) and probably president that have been decided by the private corporations that have been entrusted with our elections. It is certain that black box computer election fraud flipped an election for governor of Alabama, and there is strong evidence that it has done so in several other states as well. In 2004, the swing state of Ohio was flipped thanks to election fraud, and while the perpetrator was prosecuted, the fraudulent election results were allowed to stand.

I have absolutely zero confidence in the integrity of US elections. and not because of "voter fraud".