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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."
My apologies for the threadjacking; I'd really like to raise a key point I seem to think these campaigns tend to overlook.
.. why can't they do enough research to model the effects of their decisions over the next dozen years?
If campaigns are so keen on doing whatever they can to get one guy into office
I'll make it very simple: If you want my vote, prove to me that your choices will benefit our Country. A Billion dollars spent to obtain a four year career ought to be sufficient to prove that. Do *that* FIRST! Then you'll get my vote.
---jstlook ---For that is the way of Elves, for they say both yes AND no, and mean every word of it. --- J.R.R.T.