[Lnc-business] DRAFT RESOLUTION on the use of "Big Data"

Joshua Katz planning4liberty at gmail.com
Thu Jul 13 13:30:32 EDT 2017


Fair enough.  To the extent that targeted ads are working better and less
clunky, I say (and it seems Ms. Harlos agrees) that's a good thing, all
else being equal.  I wish I got useful ads.

Joshua A. Katz


On Thu, Jul 13, 2017 at 12:25 PM, Caryn Ann Harlos <carynannharlos at gmail.com
> wrote:

> I am in agreement with Joshua on many points - particularly the overbroad
> nature of the resolution.  It may be impossible to keep it.
>
> But where I disagree:
>
> Targeted ads to me have actually been great.  I see things now I might
> actually buy and appreciate it.  The cutest dresses in ages have come
> across my FB feed.  I actually click good ads now because I want more good
> ads and now I rarely see things I am  not interested in, and yes, I have
> bought a few things (cute shoes).
>
> My opinion of Snowden remains the same.
>
> On Thu, Jul 13, 2017 at 10:01 AM, Joshua Katz <planning4liberty at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> A few thoughts:
>>
>> 1.  I think the threats from big analytic data are oversold.  There are
>> benefits (yay getting coupons I actually need!) but, for the most part,
>> it's incredibly clumsy, even from the best in the field.  Do I really need
>> to see suits for days after I buy one?  If I needed another, I would have
>> bought it already, yet there's no ability, at least as of now, to instead
>> show me relevant ads.  For example - if a person buys a suit and is
>> unemployed, you might want to show them ads for transportation options to
>> get to interviews, lines of credit available to the unemployed,and
>> headhunters.
>>
>> 2.  I think the benefits of big analytic data are oversold.  In my view,
>> yes, campaigns are using it, and it will become a part of the landscape -
>> but I think it will shrink from its current 'fad' status.  Since campaigns
>> do not use only one tool at a time, I think data is getting credit better
>> reserved for other tactics, such as better efforts to find and exploit fat
>> tails - which does not require heavy use of analytic data.  I don't think
>> it's going away, but I think it will fade from being seen as the pinnacle
>> of smart campaigning.  I do not think we should copy these techniques, in
>> which we cannot compete.  We should adopt the basic forms that are
>> providing 90% of the benefit - say, good use of registration and turnout
>> data in a seamless database like NB - where I can make a list of those who
>> like a certain post, for instance, then send out an email on that topic -
>> but nothing more.
>>
>> 3.  My opinion of Snowden, while I do not want him prosecuted, has
>> chilled over the last year or so.  I'm less inclined to praise him in these
>> terms than I was in the past.
>>
>> 4.  I think, to the extent such "spiderwebs" exist, that they will be a
>> part of the landscape, even outside government, and we should learn how to
>> live with them (hello Torrent) and not fight a fruitless war.  I suggested
>> in a speech many years ago that our society was having a war about
>> information, with some wanting to lock it up and others wanting to free
>> it.  Some, like FB, want it both ways - people provide it for free, yet FB
>> monetizes and privatizes it.  We can win that war, I think, by pushing for
>> openness, but with that comes loss of privacy.  Fighting against openness,
>> on the other hand, means shifting power to the few with access to the
>> information.  I think the trade-off works better if we lower our privacy
>> expectations.  Think of it this way, to use a trivial example:  if 100
>> people apply for a job, and you find a picture of one of them with a lamp
>> on their head, they will probably not be hired.  If you find pictures of
>> all 100 with lamps on their heads, things level out.
>>
>> 5.  I would support a limited motion against big data, if it focused on
>> what we do (the Resolved) portion, without all the Whereas.  I think the
>> Resolved here, though, is too broad and unclear.  I'm not sure what it
>> prohibits, and that's a problem - it's a bigger problem if staff is
>> unclear.  Does it prohibit buying lists of registered Libertarians from
>> Secretaries of State?  Buying lists of "(Reason subscribers OR GOA members
>> OR NRA members OR homeschoolers) AND registered voters"?
>>
>> Joshua A. Katz
>>
>>
>> On Thu, Jul 13, 2017 at 11:44 AM, Starchild <realreform at earthlink.net>
>> wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> Ever heard the following observation about George Orwell's dystopian
>>> novel: "*1984* was not an instruction manual"?
>>>
>>> I much appreciated that dark witticism when I first heard it, and still
>>> do. But lately it occurs to me that *1984 *actually *is* a kind of an
>>> instruction manual. Not in the sense the original observation intends to
>>> warn us against, of would-be totalitarian leaders using it as a blueprint
>>> for imposing control, but in the sense of instructing the rest of us about
>>> what kinds of developments to be on guard against; what kinds of conditions
>>> we must not allow to come into being.
>>>
>>> In the spirit of trusting you my colleagues to grasp the implications of
>>> this material enough to read it as a *pro-freedom* and not an
>>> *anti-freedom* instruction manual, the following Newsweek story from
>>> June 8 addresses a topic that I believe demands our attention as a
>>> political party:
>>>
>>> *http://www.newsweek.com/2017/06/16/big-data-mines-personal-info-manipulate-voters-623131.html
>>> <http://www.newsweek.com/2017/06/16/big-data-mines-personal-info-manipulate-voters-623131.html>*
>>>
>>> A couple excerpts (much more at the link, and well worth a read):
>>>
>>> *The speaker, Alexander Nix, an Eton man, was very much among his own
>>> kind—global elites with names like Buffett, Soros, Brokaw, Pickens,
>>> Petraeus and Blair. Trouble was indeed on the way for some of the attendees
>>> at the annual summit of policymakers and philanthropists whose world order
>>> was about to be wrecked by the American election. But for Nix, chief
>>> executive officer of a company working for the Trump campaign, that mayhem
>>> was a very good thing.*
>>>
>>> *He didn’t mention it that day, but his company, Cambridge Analytica,
>>> had been selling its services to the Trump campaign, which was building a
>>> massive database of information on Americans. The company’s capabilities
>>> included, among other things, “psychographic profiling” of the electorate.
>>> And while Trump’s win was in no way assured on that afternoon, Nix was
>>> there to give a cocky sales pitch for his cool new product.*
>>>
>>> *“It’s my privilege to speak to you today about the power of Big Data
>>> and psychographics in the electoral process,” he began. As he clicked
>>> through slides, he explained how Cambridge Analytica can appeal directly to
>>> people’s emotions, bypassing cognitive roadblocks, thanks to the oceans of
>>> data it can access on every man and woman in the country...*
>>>
>>> *To illustrate, he walked the audience through what he called “a
>>> real-life example <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8Dd5aVXLCc>” taken from
>>> the company’s data on the American electorate, starting with a large
>>> anonymous group with a general set of personality types and moving down to
>>> the most specific—one man, it turned out, who was easily identifiable.*
>>>
>>> *Nix started with a group of 45,000 likely Republican Iowa caucusgoers
>>> who needed a little push—what he calls a “persuasion message”—to get out
>>> and vote for Ted Cruz (who used Cambridge Analytica early in the 2016
>>> primaries). That group’s specifics had been fished out of the data stream
>>> by an algorithm sifting the thousands of digital data points of their
>>> lives. Nix was focusing on a personality subset the company’s algorithms
>>> determined to be “very low in neuroticism, quite low in openness and
>>> slightly conscientious.”*
>>>
>>> *Click. A screen of graphs and pie charts.*
>>>
>>> *“But we can segment further. We can look at what issue they care about.
>>> Gun rights I’ve selected. That narrows the field slightly more.”*
>>>
>>> *Click. Another screen of graphs and pie charts, but with some circled
>>> specifics.*
>>>
>>> *“And now we know we need a message on gun rights. It needs to be a
>>> persuasion message, and it needs to be nuanced according to the certain
>>> personality type we are interested in.”*
>>>
>>> *Click. Another screen, the state of Iowa dotted with tiny reds and
>>> blues—individual voters.*
>>>
>>> *“If we wanted to drill down further, we could resolve the data to an
>>> individual level, where we have somewhere close to 4- or 5,000 data points
>>> on every adult in the United States.”*
>>>
>>> *Click. Another screenshot with a single circled name—Jeffrey Jay Ruest,
>>> gender: male, and his GPS coordinates.*
>>>
>>> *The American voter whose psychological tendencies Nix had just paraded
>>> before global elites like a zoo animal was easy to find. Cambridge
>>> researchers would have known much more about him than his address. They
>>> probably had access to his Facebook likes—heavy metal band Iron Maiden, a
>>> news site called eHot Rods and Guns, and membership in Facebook groups
>>> called My Daily Carry Gun and Mopar Drag Racing.*
>>>
>>> *“Likes” like those are sine qua non of the psychographic profile.*
>>>
>>> *And like every other one of the hundreds of millions of Americans now
>>> caught in Cambridge Analytica’s slicing and dicing machine, Ruest was never
>>> asked if he wanted a large swath of his most personal data scrutinized so
>>> that he might receive a message tailored just for him from Trump.*
>>> *Big Data, artificial intelligence and algorithms designed and
>>> manipulated by strategists like the folks at Cambridge have turned our
>>> world into a Panopticon, the 19th-century circular prison designed so that
>>> guards, without moving, could observe every inmate every minute of every
>>> day. *
>>>
>>>
>>> The choice for us seems clear: Will we emulate Alexander Nix, or side
>>> with Jeffrey Jay Ruest? Do we get on the big data bandwagon and attempt to
>>> beat the authoritarians at their game by being cleverer at manipulating
>>> people's personal information than they are, or do we condemn the practice
>>> and put our trust in the public to appreciate those who refuse to engage in
>>> such methods? Be manipulators, or speak out against manipulation?
>>>
>>> The Newsweek piece discusses how big data analytics has advanced, and
>>> will likely continue to advance at a rate such that by 2020, the analytics
>>> used in the 2016 campaign will look like "horse and buggy" technology.
>>> Already, writes author Nina Burleigh,* "On any given day, Team Trump
>>> was placing up to 70,000 ad variants, and around the third debate with
>>> Hillary Clinton, it pumped out 175,000 ad variants."*
>>>
>>> Of course it wasn't just the Trump campaign. According to the article, *"The
>>> Democratic National Committee has used Catalist <https://www.catalist.us/>,
>>> a 240 million–strong storehouse of voter data, containing hundreds of
>>> points of data per person, pulled from commercial and public records."
>>>  Further on, Bureigh tells us:*
>>>
>>> *Democratic strategists say Facebook’s microtargeting abilities,
>>> behavioral science and the stores of data held by other social media
>>> platforms like Twitter and Snapchat are tools that won’t go back inside
>>> Pandora’s box. They, of course, insist they won’t be looking for
>>> low-cognition voters high in neuroticism who are susceptible to fear-based
>>> messages. But Big Data plus behavioral science plus Facebook plus
>>> microtargeting is the political formula to beat. They will use it, and they
>>> won't talk about how they will refine and improve it.*
>>>
>>>
>>> Panopticon be damned, if the temptations to a candidate, or a party, of
>>> going down Nix's road aren't already obvious, read the article and I think
>>> they will be. The dangers likewise. I hope it's no mystery which side I
>>> come down on. I think we should listen to Edward Snowden, whose point of
>>> view Burleigh's piece describes thus:
>>>
>>> *Speaking to a Big Data industry conference in Washington May 15,
>>> fugitive National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden implored his
>>> audience to consider how the mass collection and preservation of records on
>>> every online interaction and activity threatens our society. “When we have
>>> people that can be tracked and no way to live outside this chain of
>>> records,” he said, “what we have become is a quantified spiderweb. That is
>>> a very negative thing for a free and open society.”*
>>>
>>>
>>> With all this in mind, I offer the following resolution. Does anyone
>>> have any suggested changes in wording before I ask for co-sponsors?
>>>
>>> ------------------------------------------------------------
>>> ------------------
>>> *Whereas a growing ability to harvest, analyze, and manipulate data has
>>> during the past few years increasingly enabled "microtargeting" in which
>>> hundreds or thousands of data points about specific individuals, harvested
>>> from online sources, are run through algorithms and analyzed using
>>> behavioral science in order to sell people products, or push political
>>> candidates or messages; and *
>>>
>>>
>>> *Whereas algorithms and data harvesting abilities are expected to
>>> continue to rapidly increase in sophistication; and*
>>> *Whereas our Republican and Democrat opponents in the 2016 United States
>>> presidential election were already cynically mining "big data" to employ
>>> "microtargeting" against millions of Americans without, in most cases, the
>>> knowledge or consent of these individuals that their personal data were
>>> being used to send them tailored messages different from those sent to
>>> other voters; and*
>>>
>>> *Whereas such practices represent a clear and present danger to freedom,
>>> with NSA whistleblower and libertarian hero Edward Snowden warning
>>> that,“When we have people that can be tracked and no way to live outside
>>> this chain of records, what we have become is a quantified spiderweb," and
>>> calling this "a very negative thing for a free and open society"; and*
>>>
>>>
>>> *Whereas we reject the top-down, authoritarian mindset underlying these
>>> and other unethical policies and practices of the "cartel parties" and the
>>> government institutions they dominate, and exist instead to defend the
>>> rights of the individual,*
>>> *We therefore hereby resolve that the Libertarian National Committee
>>> will not use "big data" under this or any other name, to engage in
>>> "microtargeting" under this or any other name, by obtaining and analyzing
>>> large numbers of data points about specific individuals without the
>>> explicit consent of those individuals in order to market, advertise, or
>>> promote our party or candidates to them, or to raise money from them, and
>>> urge all Libertarian candidates and campaigns to make a similar pledge.*
>>> ------------------------------------------------------------
>>> ------------------
>>>
>>> Love & Liberty,
>>>
>>>                                  ((( starchild )))
>>> At-Large Representative, Libertarian National Committee
>>>                         RealReform at earthlink.net
>>>                                 (415) 625-FREE
>>>                                   @StarchildSF
>>>
>>>
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>>> Lnc-business at hq.lp.org
>>> http://hq.lp.org/mailman/listinfo/lnc-business_hq.lp.org
>>>
>>>
>>
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>>
>
>
> --
> *In Liberty,*
> *Caryn Ann Harlos*
> Region 1 Representative, Libertarian National Committee (Alaska, Arizona,
> Colorado, Hawaii, Kansas, Montana, Utah, Wyoming, Washington) - Caryn.Ann.
> Harlos at LP.org <Caryn.Ann.Harlos at LP.org>
> Communications Director, Libertarian Party of Colorado
> <http://www.lpcolorado.org>
> Colorado State Coordinator, Libertarian Party Radical Caucus
> <http://www.lpradicalcaucus.org>
> Chair, LP Historical Preservation Committee
>
> A haiku to the Statement of Principles:
> *We defend your rights*
> *And oppose the use of force*
> *Taxation is theft*
>
>
>
>
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