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

[Caryn Ann Harlos]

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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>>
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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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