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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. "
When Netflix furor broke out about being able to identify a person by the ratings they gave, it turns out that it was only possible when a person had rated an obscure movie (and had cross rated the same movie over different websites).
When Target furor broke out out predicting pregnancy, it was based largely on if you bought a certain type of cream.
I know data mining and such is an attractive but most times it just boils down to some obscure identifier over all the data. Optimizing this and balancing hundreds of factors, does that even work?
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.
Somehow we talk about campaign donations being the be all and end all, but we are obviously missing something:
pro-bono work done by media and technology experts that other canidates would have to pay for. This by-passes all donation contributions. In an ideal system you wouldn't need campaign finance reform, because people would make informed decisions, and no amount of money spent could change that. Thats not true. Money can buy votes. We all know this, but HOW is rarely discussed, because the people taking the money are the same people reporting the donations.
They buy you, by buying the "favorite celebrities" they already sold you previously. They overhype their strengths, and they downplay the really creepy and criminal things they do. They then go out of their way to let you know what bad guys the people who don't like celebrities are, and how you'll be social outcast if you give up on your favorite celebrities.
In the new digital age, there is also facebook. Once they know everything about you, it makes it easier to push your buttons. What if they find some dark sexual secret? Find out your weaknesses, exploit them. Since they already know who your friends are, they can tell them, or let them know subtly.
They can manipulate the girl you always had a crush on into sleeping with you, or dating you, because now they know. They can do all kinds of things to her as well.(mabey she spies on you?).
Since they know all your personal informaiton they can pretend to be an old long lost friend and use their credibility to bombard you with propaganda.
Speaking of propaganda, they can easily bypass your intellectual guards by finding out what pushes your buttongs and tailoring propaganda specificly to you.
All this is done pro-bono. This is what we know their capabilities are because they BRAG about them. Now it gets better, what if they want information about the opposition? What if they want to target organizers, donors, and leading voices opposing canidate XZY? What if they used the information to conduct smears of the opposition?
What if they targeted and harrassed campaign organizers and leaders. with information like this they'd be able to do with almost without being known about.
They aren't going to tell you that. Its not beyond their capabilities. Your a fool to think they never considered it.
They had the "candidate" (read: meaningless distraction puppet) who was better at LYING.
Post-election, they are EXACTLY the same, since they are "electoral property" owned by the exact same abusive feudalistic companies.
INB4 gullible believers in the system (= the opposite but just as crazy extreme to conspiracy theorists) being in denial.
be aware they have no easy way out as their political landscape has become a house a mirrors, set up by google
your tinfoil hat is tight enough to cut off the blood supply
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.
Your post actually made sense up until that point. This has been going on far longer than Google has existed.
24 beers in a case, 24 hours in a day. Coincidence? I think not!
put it all on red for another spin.
No, the last two times they put it on black.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
Oh, pleeeeeeeeeease.....
"The Democrats had the better candidate, in the sense of being able to connect with voters on the campaign trail. Mitt Romney made one gaffe after another during the primary season,"
Obama is a gaffe machine... he said he thought he'd been to 57 states and had one more to visit... he clearly did not know what a navy medic was... he has repeatedly gone to ceremonies honoring dead people and announced that he saw many of those he was there to honor in the audience... on and on and on.... but if you get your news from the mainstream media or comedy central you do not know this stuff because they hide his gaffes just like they hid JFK's numerous affairs and his drug use and just like they hid Bill Clinton's proclivities when he was a candidate (something Chris Matthews admitted on TV during the Lewinski affair). Democrats ridiculed VP candidate Palin for writing a couple words on her hand as a reminder prior to a speech, but there have been repeated events proving Obama cannot give a speech w/o the full text on a teleprompter or on paper in his hands (Reminder: Palins entire 2008 convention speech was off-the-cuff and w/o notes... the teleprompters failed as she walked onto the stage)
"the "we had binders full of women" boast during the second debate..."
Democrat politicians all over the country also have binders full of women, and blacks, and hispanics, etc (people they have pre-screened to some degree to have a head-start on political appointments should they win an election to an executive office... one of the biggest jokes of the 2012 campaign is that democrats twisted that comment into fake outrage and cheerfully implied the comment was somehow related to placing women in bondage
"Immigration. Romney made a tactical decision (not personal) before the 2008 election to pander to the Republican base on the issue, as a way of answering any doubts about whether he was a conservative. He stuck to that course in 2012. He lost the pretty close to the entire Hispanic vote in the general election;"
Republicans have a long tradition (all the way back to Abraham Lincoln) as a party (though admittedly not all of their candidates) that does not have different policies for different groups of people based on their skin color. Democrats, who for their entire history back to and including the KKK and slavery have always been fixated on skin color. Over the past few decades, Democrats have twisted this into all-out pandering to racial groups and they claim that Republicans who refuse to pander are racists. No matter how hard a Republican candidate tries to break-out from his party tradition by race-pandering, he can never out-pander a Democrat (Even when George W offered Amnesty, 60% of the hispanic vote went to the Democrats who offered amnesty with more hand-outs
"the fact that the housing and banking crisis and collapse of the economy occurred during Bush's watch with Bush's tax policies and Treasury/SEC administration."
Ahhh yes... The congress went to the Democrats in 2006 and they used their power to block the Bush admin attempt to stop the risky home loan activity at Govt-run FannieMae and FreddieMac. Leading Democrats like Senator Chris Dodd and Congressman Barney Frank ridiculed the idea that anything bad was happening and that there was any danger in the home loan marketplace. Then Democrat senators Joe Biden and Barack Obama both voted along with ALL democrats in the senate to stop Bush from preventing the disaster (Bush himself had no vote and, without senate approval, had no legal authority to intervene) Bush was FAR from perfect... but he was less to blame for the meltdown than the Democrat congress (and the Clintons... who during the 90's had kicked all the risky home loans into overdrive as a national policy that "everyone deserves" to own a home...)
"Obama certainly had better IT, but that was far down on the list of factors."
Actually, Obama HAD competent IT... Romney had none... a
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
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.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
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.
Dude, if the founding fathers could see what came out of their dream, they'd probably go "why bother" too.
And you better don't ask "What would Jesus do". I'm pretty sure it would be along the lines of "get nailed up there for THOSE idiots's sins? Dude, I'm Jesus, but there's even limits to my compassion!"
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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.
None. But the amount of times we get zero I'd somehow feel like that table is rigged somehow.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Owned by the exact same abusive feudalistic companies... it's not true, and you know it ain't true. The parties are owned by very different abusive feudalistic companies, you have the free choice which corporations you want to rule you and rip you off.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Well, people laughed at me when I complained in 1990 about how we're losing something important when the USSR crumbled and how it protected our freedom by proxy.
Because as long as there have been those evil commies with their lack of freedom, our leaders needed to keep their white hats shiny so we knew who were the bad guys. Today, why bother with it, it's not like you have any other system you could run for.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Governor Romney deluded himself that his supposedly private fundraising speech would never be revealed to the rest of the world.
Also, an overwhelming percentage of Big Media (meaning not just 'media bosses' but the rank-and-file reporters, etc.) were out and out Obama supporters. So any gaffe that Romney committed was instantly in play and out there. Whereas there are huge holes in the public's understanding of Obama and his private life and past yet today. There are even polished and well-recognized slur-names to refer to those who point this fact out.
Democrats are more likely (according to that study) to go with their party than Republicans... BUT... that's not even the best part...
This effect is under-reported by the paper's (false) pretense that the spying by the two administrations was the same. During the Bush years, Democrats were rabid over the typically mis-named (by politicians) "Patriot Act" which enable warrantless wiretaps and such on Americans if they were on one end of a conversation and the party on the other end was a terror suspect outside the US ..... But in the era of Obama, the federal government is spying on every single American (without a warrant, AND without probable cause in clear conflict with the plain text of the Constitution) and monitoring communications where the parties on both ends are NOT terror suspects and are INSIDE the US. In the era of Bush, companies like Google who were collecting data on everybody in exchange for use of their services (nothing in life is free) were in a separate realm from the government... but in this shiny new era of growing National Socialism, Google and the federal government are in bed together with employees regularly moving back-and-forth between them, unknown data exchanges between them, Google working to elect them (in exchange for power? money? regulatory "wiggle room"? help suppressing competitors via government oversight/regulation?) and no transparency. This government/big-business/one-party-allegience "partnership" experiment was run in the 1930's... it does not end well for the little guy (and the technology available for oppression now is far more powerful
My liberal friends who were shrieking expletives at Bush are now responding to Obama with {insert sound of crickets chirping}
TOTAL, unabashed, Hypocrisy
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?".)
Oh, not again. Every once in a while ignorant people complain about America's "two-party system" — failing to account for the vast differences between our political system and that of most of the Democracies of the world.
You see, we do not have parties in the same sense as other countries. Voters here vote for individuals, whose party-affiliation is fluid and non-binding. Every once in a while an elected official may switch their party — without any legal consequences. In other countries voters vote for a party, who then pick individual politicians to fill the slots the legislature. The number of slots is in proportion to the total number share of votes won by the party.
Though some State-laws regulate the parties in the US, there is nothing about them in our Constitution or Federal Law. And for good reason — Americans vote for individuals, not parties. Whether that's "better" or "worse" is another topic, but it is different. There is no law regulating the establishing of a party, or how it is operated. Oh, and we have multiple parties: Communists of different kind (as usual for them), Libertarians, Green... That they aren't winning many offices is not the fault of the system...
BTW, if you think, a multi-party system (however it is achieved) will automatically be better — think again.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
This is one of the main reasons I want this country to abandon its two-party system.
The country doesn't have a two party system. It has individuals that choose to associated into groups (parties) to maximize their chance of getting things done in elections and legislative efforts.
The parties we happen to see right now are always in a state of flux (really, there was political history before you were old enough to pay attention). People's participation in those parties ebb and flow, and the priorities focused on by the parties changes with all sorts of variables.
If you were to decide to unconstitutionally ban the activities of the Democrat and Republican parties, people would just congregate around something by a different name. That freedom to associate is fundamental. It has nothing to do with a "system," in that the ways that political parties organize themselves or caucus together in the legislature isn't part of the constitution or within government purview, per se. What you're saying is that you think the constitution's protection of freedom of assembly is old fashioned, and you think the government should dictate who can gather into and act as a group. Nice.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
The last Prime Minister of the UK who "inherited" the post from his father was William Pitt the Younger who took on the role in 1783. Since then we've had women, socialists (really real socialists, not right-wing conservatives like Clinton and Obama), liberals (who are not socialists) and deep-down conservatives as Prime Minister and few if any of them had much in the way of a family history in the role (Winston Churchill may have been an exception but his father never made it to high office). The US has had a number of Presidents in the past century whose dynastic relationships through blood and marriage into money are only exceeded by traditionally hereditary Senators (like the Kennedys), Governors and Congressmen (like the Bushes). It's why there was so much shock and disbelief about President Obama winning the last two elections since he's not filthy rich and he's not the product of a plutocratic political dynasty like George W. Bush or Senator Jay Rockefeller IV.
I recognized back in the early days of the Obama administration that there was a key quid pro quo for bailing out the large banking firms that were caught in the real-estate crisis trap of their own making.
Each one of those firms had its own synthetic model of the economy, probably researched in fine detail and hyperlinked in clever ways. I thought that part of the 'price' for a Government bailout would be the sharing of the code, architectural details, etc. of these various programs, which could then be set up somewhere like Bay St. Louis to be run for the advantage of... well, ultimately, the American taxpayer.
I suspect we are now seeing the results of exactly why that technology wasn't demanded.. publically, at least... and perhaps how we can expect to see it used in future...