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Pols Blur Line Between Data Mining, Cyberstalking

Posted by timothy on from the selfless-public-servants-all dept.

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."

3 of 115 comments (clear)

  1. Anything They Want To, According to Privacy Policy by theodp · · Score: 4, Informative

    From Obama for America PRIVACY POLICY: "we may use personal information we collect...for any other purpose for which the information was collected....We may store and process personal information in the United States and other countries... You may also opt out of allowing OFA to collect your geographic location by changing the location settings on your mobile device..."

  2. OFA: Sample Techie Job Requirements by theodp · · Score: 4, Informative

    From the Job Boards: "We are a multi-disciplinary team of statisticians, mathematicians, software developers, general analysts and organizers - all striving for a single goal: re-electing President Obama." 1) Digital Analytics - Data Production Analyst: MySQL, Perl, Python, Netezza, MS SQL, Vertica, Hive/Hadoop, Google Analytics, Optimizely, R, STATA, SPSS. 2) Analytics - Statistical Modeling Analyst: (M.S./PhD preferred), R, STATA, SPSS, Weka, KNIME, SQL HTML, XML, Python, Ruby, Java, C++, Excel. 3) Digital Analytics - Modeling Analyst: R, STATA, SPSS, SAS, Excel, Netezza, MS SQL, Vertica, Hive/Hadoop, Google Analytics, Optimizely.

  3. WTF is a Pol by chrismcb · · Score: 3, Informative

    WTF is a POL? I can barely understand the summary, doesn't look like there is a lot of English in there. The first three lines has like 2 verbs. But can we at least have a summary that makes a bit of sense? Like maybe don't use abbreviations when it isn't necessary. My first thought was it was a typo and they meant Polls...