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. "

Comments

Re:Well, yeah.

[pecosdave]

During the elections I pointed out many times how my Google Plus feed was filling up with pro-Obama post on a regular basis from people I didn't know who weren't associated with people I did know. Sometimes these would only have a +5 and one or two reshares if even that. On the other hand I saw two or three Romney post come through the entire election cycle, and then only if they had something akin to a +70 and a dozen reshares or so.

To put it in perspective I thought they were both bad choices for the country, I was a Ron Paul/Gary Johnson fan and I'm a Libertarian who doesn't like either of those Bozo's. There was little doubt Google was really, really, trying hard to get me Obamafied and was almost upset it wasn't working.