[Lnc-business] DRAFT RESOLUTION on the use of "Big Data"
Caryn Ann Harlos
carynannharlos at gmail.com
Thu Jul 13 13:32:16 EDT 2017
Too bad you don't like cute vintage style dresses and shoes. That ads have
ROCKED.
-Caryn Ann
On Thu, Jul 13, 2017 at 11:30 AM, Joshua Katz <planning4liberty at gmail.com>
wrote:
> 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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>>>>
>>>>
>>>
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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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>>
>>
>
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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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