Slashdot Mirror
Data Miners Liken Obama Voters To Caesars Gamblers
theodp writes "As Steve Wozniak publicly laments how government used new technologies he introduced in unintended ways to monitor people, the NY Times reports how the digital masterminds behind the Obama Presidential campaign are cashing in by bringing the secret, technologically advanced formulas used for reaching voters to commercial advertisers. 'The plan is to bring the same Big Data expertise that guided the most expensive presidential campaign in history to companies and nonprofits,' explains Civis Analytics, which is backed by Google Chairman and Obama advisor Eric Schmidt. Also boasting senior members of Obama's campaign team is Analytics Media Group (A.M.G.), which pitched that 'keeping gamblers loyal to Caesars was not all that different from keeping onetime Obama voters from straying to Mitt Romney.' The extent to which the Obama campaign used the newest tech tools to look into people's lives was largely shrouded, the Times reports, but included data mining efforts that triggered Facebook's internal safeguard alarms. ... 'We asked to see [voter's Facebook] photos but really we were looking for who were tagged in photos with you, which was a really great way to dredge up old college friends — and ex-girlfriends.' The Times also explains how the Obama campaign was able to out-optimize the Romney campaign on TV buys by obtaining set-top box TV show viewing information from cable companies for voters on the Obama campaign's 'persuadable voters' list. "
The real reason people are scared of big data is because the more and more we study it, the more and more it is proven that most people are very, very predictable. It's gotten to the point that companies optimize the color placement of objects in the background of their advertising to appeal to people they are targetting.
The thing that amazes me however is how some companies can still get things so outstandingly wrong/backwards in this day and age. Take the recent Microsoft Xbox One fiasco. I find it hard to believe that a company like Microsoft would not have known this reaction was coming. Any trivial study of online sentiment data would have shown this in advance.
Sometimes people just don't realize the full implications of their own analogies...
Ceasar's Palace exists for one reason and one reason only - to extract as much of money out of their customers^h^h^h^h^h^h suckers as possible. They (and all of the other modern casino/resorts) pioneered "Big Data" techniques to figure out just how much they could squeeze out of every person that comes into contact with them. They've got official policies on paper to deny it. but they are happy to manipulate and exploit addiction to get all of the money.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
People who vote for either of the two main parties are incredibly idiotic, so this isn't much of a surprise.
I agree, and I want to add that among those voters, the worst (in my opinion) are those who're able to abandon their own principles on a critical non-partisan issue based upon whether there's a Demoblican or a Republocrat in office. I can't wrap my head around it, but I find it appalling — they've got zero fucking integrity* and have no business in a voting booth.
* Just like the D/R candidates.
For those interested, here are the full results from Pew Research's domestic surveillance poll, showing additional demographic breakdowns.
Thank you, Edward Snowden.
"Arguments from authority are worthless." —Carl Sagan
Some politicians believe today they can speak privately to groups of supporters and those words will not be recorded and released to the world, or their secrets revealed by well-connected insiders. In the past this was true; either there was no cheap easy method to record their words and deeds (phone cameras, fifty-buck video recorders etc.) or the gatekeeper press would simply not report what they knew (FDR in a wheelchair, JFK's medical problems, Reagan's Alzheimers etc.) The world has changed and successful politicians are aware of this. If you don't want what you say made public then don't say it to anyone.
Governor Romney deluded himself that his supposedly private fundraising speech would never be revealed to the rest of the world. That's part of the reason he lost the election. His own campaign's efforts in data collection and analysis and Get Out The Vote was as big and as complex as President Obama's but it was incompetently implemented (first live-fire test of a complex multilevel data delivery system involving thousands of operators on the day of the election? Really?) The only good thing that came out of that expensive fiasco was that several of his friends and colleagues made a lot of money out of it.
Hey, he said "Yes we can". I don't remember anyone saying anything about actually doing something.
You gotta read those promises carefully.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The Obama campaign treated voters as consumers, because the vast majority of voters treat democracy as a supermarket. Instead of being informed, listen to each other, actively voice their position in petitions and protests, and generally be involved in governance, modern voters just switch to the other brand of soap. To carry on with the metaphor, some of them abandon soap altogether and choose not to shower. This "exit" strategy has reached particularity absurd level in the United States where a number of voters (the so called "independents") bounce as ping-pong balls between the two parties every four years. These voters are never satisfied with the government they just elected, yet they cannot be bothered to actively push this government to fulfill promises or address their grievances. So, if you approach democracy as market, the politicians will treat you as shoppers. You got what you asked for, why are you complaining? (Disclosure: These are not my ideas, I stole them from a book called "In Mistrust We Trust: Can Democracy Survive When We Don't Trust Our Leaders?".)