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With all the high dudgeon over the alleged privacy violations of Cambridge Analytica, I was inspired to go back and look at the admiring articles that were written about the Obama 2012 campaign and its use of data to focus its campaign messages to individual voters, about whom they knew just about everything.
Take this article from the Guardian in February of 2012:
Obama, Facebook and the power of friendship: the 2012 data election
Every time an individual volunteers to help out – for instance by offering to host a fundraising party for the president – he or she will be asked to log onto the re-election website with their Facebook credentials. That in turn will engage Facebook Connect, the digital interface that shares a user's personal information with a third party.
Consciously or otherwise, the individual volunteer will be injecting all the information they store publicly on their Facebook page – home location, date of birth, interests and, crucially, network of friends– directly into the central Obama database. (emphasis mine)
If that wasn't enough to warn Facebook users that their clicks were going to give up their friends and interests, I don't know what would.
Post-election, MIT's Technology Review ran a very long article showing how the Obama campaign was able to get to know every single person who voted for Obama in 2008.
Obama’s campaign began the election year confident it knew the name of every one of the 69,456,897 Americans whose votes had put him in the White House. They may have cast those votes by secret ballot, but Obama’s analysts could look at the Democrats’ vote totals in each precinct and identify the people most likely to have backed him. Pundits talked in the abstract about reassembling Obama’s 2008 coalition. But within the campaign, the goal was literal. They would reassemble the coalition, one by one, through personal contacts...
To be sure of winning, the effort had to go way beyond that, and identify what it considered, through data, to be persuadable voters who didn't vote for Obama in 2008. Believe it or not, they were able to access and use data collected from cable TV set-top boxes to focus their ad buys for maximum efficiency in targeting those persuadable voters, whom they had already identified.
Davidsen, whose previous work had left her intimately familiar with the rich data sets held in set-top boxes, understood that a lot of that data was available in the form of tuner and DVR histories collected by cable providers and then aggregated by research firms. For privacy reasons, however, the information was not available at the individual level. “The hardest thing in media buying right now is the lack of information,” she says.
Davidsen began negotiating to have research firms repackage their data in a form that would permit the campaign to access the individual histories without violating the cable providers’ privacy standards. Under a $350,000 deal she worked out with one company, Rentrak, the campaign provided a list of persuadable voters and their addresses, derived from its microtargeting models, and the company looked for them in the cable providers’ billing files. When a record matched, Rentrak would issue it a unique household ID that identified viewing data from a single set-top box but masked any personally identifiable information.
Fast forward to this week, and what we're hearing about Cambridge Analytica; here's a link from CNBC.
On Friday, Facebook announced that it had suspended Cambridge Analytica, suggesting the firm had not been honest about deleting user data sent to it by the makers of a popular psychology test app.
That particular app, called "thisisyourdigitallife," was itself banned by Facebook back in 2015. However, the social network has accused Cambridge Analytica of holding that data, despite assurances to the contrary.
Now, are we supposed to believe that any FB users who clicked into this "popular psychology test" thought their data would remain private????? This seems like the jayvees when it comes to capturing data about Americans.