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:What are they using this data for?

[PopeRatzo]

Do you think that everyone at the company are both Romney only voters and are unethical?

No, but you learn very quickly what the boss wants and expects without him having to be explicit.

Only the manufacture of voting machines, and do you really want the government in that business? The elections are supervised the same old way, and votes are still cast by voters.

Yes, I want elections run by government. It's the way the Founding Fathers did it and it's the way it was done for 200+ years.

And no, elections are not "supervised the same old way", and there is absolutely no guarantee in black box voting (especially the kind with no paper audit) that voters' votes are being counted. We have examples of elections where votes were NOT counted and the machines were manipulated to fix the results.

Besides, don't worry, the the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, the NAACP and the ACLU have your back,

And thank god they've got your back, too.