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. "
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.
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.
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.
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.