Originally published by Jules Polonetsky on LinkedIn: We’ve created some very, very angry people
Will the Senators holding Facebook hearings this week pledge to refrain from Cambridge Analytica type tactics in their upcoming campaign advertising? I have been observing the outrage around the Facebook Cambridge Analytica mess with a cynical eye, because I see politicians fuming at the misuse of data by Cambridge Analytica, while many of them have in the past used and will continue to use aggressive data collection and targeting in their upcoming campaigns. Of course the Facebook outrage has uncorked concerns about privacy and data broader than Cambridge Analytica, but does anyone think there would be a joint hearing of two Senate committees if Angry Birds had scarfed down and sold Facebook user data? The toxic mix of privacy, politics, Brexit, Bannon, and voter targeting practices that seem surreptitious has hit a nerve that has led to a global backlash. But missing from the reactions by politicians has been an interest in examining the scope of practices similar to Cambridge Analytica that are widespread in the political advertising world.
Read this, from Jordan Lieberman of Audience Partners, a leading political ad targeting firm based in Washington, D.C.:
"It’s rare when I’m targeting more than 4% of any population for a candidate or cause. 96% of you will never hear the outrageous thing I just said to your neighbor, best friend, or coworker. Tack on thousands of additional data points, and now my ability to target is greater than your ability to develop different creative versions. Do this over and over, trillions of times over a decade or two, and you should not expect us to come back together for a sane school board meeting or care about a bowling league.
The end result?
We’ve created some very, very angry people. Targeting primary voters created a feedback loop where we only talk to engaged voters, and people are arguably engaged because they are hit repeatedly to draw out the most vitriolic messengers and messages. And just like Paris Hilton is famous for being famous, engaged voters are engaged because we engage them."
These methods may use social media data, but often they use data collected from innocuous surveys, where voter signing online petitions have little idea that they are providing data that will be linked to their web browsing cookies and mobile advertising identifiers, along with data from data brokers, web sites they visit and voter file data.
More than a decade ago, when I worked at AOL, our policy and compliance team held the gate against the most extreme uses of voter data. In those days, only AOL had a large identified user base, with addresses and real names. We didn't allow pinning voter files to our users or the use of precise geographic information, as we thought it would creep out our paying customers. But, today most anything goes at companies when it comes to electoral ad targeting.. (Yes, in Europe the national privacy laws in theory restrict this, although clearly enforcement has not kept up. The penalties and obligations of the new European General Data Protection Regulation may soon solve that problem). It is a hard challenge to address this in the US, given the strong constitutional protections for political speech - but there will be no limits for elections, psychographic data and every type of data that can be purchased if there is no line in the sand that can' t be crossed.