PRIVACY, ACCOUNTABILITY, AND
ACCESS IN THE AGE OF THE
PERSONALIZED CAMPAIGN
Tarun Wadhwa
@twadhwa
November 1st, 2013
PLEAD 2013
How we are identified is changing
• We create, disclose, and share more information about
ourselves than at any time in history
• Social media, digital lifestyles, metadata
• Personal information is becoming centralized
• Data miners, silos coming down, and the plummeting cost of storage and
retrieval
• Your world is becoming who you are, how you’re defined
• Personalization and the race for “the new oil”
What you made possible
• Core functions: healthcare insurance, background checks,
financial transactions – basically, things that involve trust
But also…
• An entire ecosystem where your personal information and
history is a currency traded in exchange for services that seem
free
• Your information can now be processed by machine to render
judgments about you, what you’re like, and what you might do
• While you have little to no control over how these judgments
are made and how they might effect you
Your data and your future
• By getting to know you, the systems and institutions you
interact with have the chance to offer you services that are
more relevant to your needs
• But by knowing your needs, they can categorize and sort you
into whatever classifications they deem appropriate
• You will never get to see your “personal file” – you have no
claim or ownership of it
“Targeting” in the private sector
• Big data has revolutionized the way that brands interact with,
track, and reach out to their customers
• In an (in)famous example, Target was able to determine
whether a teenage girl was pregnant before her own family
(NYT)
• Assigned each customer an ID number based on identifying piece of
information (credit card, name, e-mail address, home address)
• Collects information of everything they’ve bought and any demographic
information they can get a hold of
• Look at historical buying data for other people in similar demographics
• Look for patterns in when things are purchased and when life events
occur
Around the world, it’s the same story
• Technology is being used to enable billions of people to receive
recognition for the first time in history
• We have our best shot in history of reducing corruption and
creating a more transparent, effective form of governance
• But our civilian systems are always a step behind while our
security systems are advanced
What does our government prioritize?
Why is the Department of Motor Vehicles such a mess
in a nation that has built the largest, most
comprehensive surveillance state in human history?
Why is it that our voter targeting is cutting edge, but
our voter registration processes have lacked any real
innovation for decades?
Voter targeting itself is nothing new
In 1897 William Jennings Bryan built a database of 200,000 index cards
tracking things like a person's religion, income, party affiliation, and
occupation of everyone his failed campaign had correspondence with
• Early stages, worked well for Bush in 2004
• Earlier databases such as Voter Vault, Catalist, and Aristotle
played vital in many elections
• Contribution history has been helpful in determining likelihood
future contribution
• Main uses: fundraising, recruitment, issue tracking, get out the
vote efforts
Joe Trippi in MIT Technology Review
• Most advanced technology in 1979 – “the telephone call
combined with meticulous use of three-by-five index cards”
• “An index card would be created with the voter’s name, address, and
phone number—and a code number for the person’s answer to that one
question”
• “…would give way to computer-generated printouts over time, but the
basic coding system in politics stayed the same” – Until Obama’s 2012
campaign
• A focus on television led to “politics started to lose its soul, which is the
active participation of ordinary voters in elections.”
• Big data “allowed the campaign to rebuild that winning
coalition, vote by vote”
Why voter targeting matters
• A relatively small group of people end up deciding the outcome
of elections – not the popular vote
• People who vote, are engaged
• Swing states and targeting by geography
• “Independents” and those who happen to live in swing districts
• In the 2000 presidential campaign, hundreds of millions of
dollars were spent on reaching just 7 percent of voters -- less
than 8 million people
• Get out the vote efforts can make an enormous difference for a
candidate – often, it can be the deciding factor
What information is being used
• Information already collected previously
• Public records: local, state, and federal records
• Party registration, voting history, political donations, vehicle registration,
real estate records
• Commercial information: magazine subscriptions, credit
history, purchasing history, etc.
• Internet and social data – “data exhaust”
From “300 distinct bits on each voter in 2004 to
more than 900 today” (The Atlantic)
What “microtargeting” makes possible
• “Inside microtargeting offices in Washington and across the
nation, individual voters are today coming through in HDTV
clarity -- every single digitally-active American consumer, which
is 91 percent of us, according to Pew Internet research. Political
strategists buy consumer information from data brokers, mash
it up with voter records and online behavior, then run the
seemingly-mundane minutiae of modern life -- most-visited
websites, which soda's in the fridge -- through complicated
algorithms and: pow!”
• - Willie Desmond, Strategic Telemetry to The Atlantic
Source: National Media Research Planning & Placement
Source: National Media Research Planning & Placement
It’s become a lot easier to track you
• Campaigns using some of the same tactics as online marketers
– trick you into giving up way more information than you
realized by burying it in the terms of service
• Using cookies to track you across the internet to measure your
interests and behavior
• Mobile phones are ubiquitous, consumers have a very shallow
understanding of how much data these devices create
• The myth of anonymous data collection
Reaching you in the real world
• The tools used by on-the-ground organizers, volunteers now far
more sophisticated than ever before – ease of use changes
everything
Source: ProPublica
Pandering gets social
• In addition to mining your social media posts, your network is
being analyzed to see what your friends can reveal about you
• You don’t even have to be involved to be a part of the system
• Belief that if only people heard the right message for them,
then they could become a supporter
Source: http://media4.s-nbcnews.com/j/streams/2013/June/130621/6C7973648-121001-social-media-politics-5p.blocks_desktop_large.jpg
The “filter bubble” comes to politics
• Eli Pariser focused on Google, Facebook, but the larger trend is
coming to other areas as well
• We’ve always sought out media particular to our interests –
now that’s being done for us
• “Confirmation bias” and political discourse
Source: http://derekdevries.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/filterbubble.jpg
Preaching to the choir
• “In recent primary states, Romney aired two very different ads
on local news websites: one for supporters, and another for
those who may not support him. This sort of thing could pop
up on television as well very soon. Within five years, Will
Feltus of the National Media predicts, advertisers and
politicians will only target households where the messages
can have maximum effect” – Terrence McCoy, The Atlantic
What will it do to our national political discourse when
we are not even hearing the same messages?
Americans still haven’t come around
• This election, both campaigns broke new ground on the use of
big data, but targeting remains unpopular with the public
“68% of internet users agree with a statement that they are not
okay with targeted advertising because they don’t like having
their online behavior tracked and analyzed; 28% backed a
statement that they are okay with targeted advertising because
it means they see advertisements and get information about
things they are really interested in” – Pew Internet, 2012
Democratization of voter targeting
• The value and quality of a database
• These same types of tactics will seep down to lower levels and
smaller elections
• Example of United in Purpose (NPR):
• Evangelical Christian non-profit
• Scores people based on whether they like NASCAR, fishing – whether
they are anti-abortion or support traditional marriage
• Attributes turned into points, if over 600 points considered “serious
about their faith”
• They will be contacted if they have not registered to vote
New barriers to entry
• On the other hand, the best databases are still controlled by
the largest parties
• Daniel Kreiss in Stanford Law Review on negative potential long
term consequences:
• “Political data and the consulting services necessary to render it
actionable are not cheap. Wealthy candidates and those with deeppocketed allies have a competitive advantage in their ability to purchase
comprehensive voter data and sophisticated modeling and targeting
services. Minor party and insurgent candidates within parties have
comparatively fewer resources to spend on these services. Even the
prices parties charge their own candidates to access their voter files can
be prohibitively expensive. For example, the Iowa Democratic Party
charged its presidential candidates $100,000 to access its data in 2008.”
Crowdsourced attempts to capture ads
• ProPublica’s Message Machine was a fantastic start – but we
need to grow this considerably
• Over 500 readers submitted >10,000 ads
There are several major questions that
must be addressed in order for these
technologies and tactics to be used
responsibly in the future
Who gets to access your information?
- Voters currently have no real option to limit or control – or
even know – who else their data is being shared with
- Should this be something that each candidate is responsible
for, or should it be done at the party level?
- Is there any way to restrict what information is held by whom?
"As a voter, I would feel a lot more comfortable if campaigns
gave voters the option of whether or not they could pass their
information on to other groups” – Andrew Rasiej, founder of
Personal Democracy Forum and TechPresident
Should we set limits?
• What happens when this type of
personal targeting apparatus is
applied to wedge issues?
• What happens when we appeal not
to what were interested in, but to
what we fear?
• Who gets to decide what issues are
fair game? Running a blanket TV
commercial is far different from
tailoring an ad or message that
follows you around the internet.
Source: The Washington Post
Who is going to protect your information?
• Centralized databases are “honeypots” for hackers – and even
the largest, most sophisticated security companies face threats
from hackers
• While it is true that most of the information campaigns
collecting can be found in other places, there is a risk in
aggregating it and making it vulnerable given scale
• There are better and worse ways to store this data and allow
others to access it, but when you have no right to know, you
can never be sure what practices used
• Can a group of political experts really be expected to be top
notch at cyber security as well?
Also, there is no way to opt-out
• A few times, there have been different
proposals for political “Do Not Call” list – but we
need to reconsider this and take it seriously
• A large segment of the population doesn’t care to be
bothered with political messages
• There is a reasonable debate over whether
voting is a civic duty… but is engaging in the
process and being targeted by messages a civic
duty?
Source:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
File:US-DoNotCallRegistryLogo.svg
What value are we placing on privacy?
• Political views rarely remain constant through lifetime, privacy
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•
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allows us the ability to grow and develop our own views
How opinions are formed is just as important as the fact that
they are there
When everything is automatically recorded, measured, and
categorized it becomes far more difficult to explore new
positions or experiment with other political views
Will freedom of speech and association undergo irreparable
harm in the age of social media?
There may be no credible harm yet – but vast majority of
people not aware this is going on, technologies advancing
Obama, privacy, and regulation
• Despite the revelations of the last few months, there have been
several times when the President has spoke of the need to
protect our privacy online
• In 2012, proposed a “Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights”
• But his campaign worked with some of these types of firms;
questions over whether his own staff’s efforts would be
restricted under such regulation
• Same principles suggested for private industry would be helpful
for campaigns to adopt:
• Transparency, respect for context, security, access and accuracy, focused
collection, accountability
• Larger need to update privacy laws, framework outdated
What lies ahead four years from now?
• How much more data will we create?
• Images, video uploaded
• Location data
• Social content created
• How will the ecosystem change?
• Further centralization
• Greater sharing, more players
• What new types of data will be created?
• Health information
• Deeper social graph
• Greater reliance on cloud storage
“Voters expect to be able to obsessively
analyze information about the candidates,
not the other way around”- Tim Murphy
Who are we building these systems for?