[Lnc-business] DRAFT RESOLUTION on the use of "Big Data"
Starchild
sfdreamer at earthlink.net
Sat Jul 15 22:05:35 EDT 2017
I believe that getting people's consent first, which is what the resolution I wrote calls for, before digging into their personal lives and using it to push products or messages on people, is a resolution to use big data ethically. Obtained in that manner, I too agree with Ken that it's not inherently evil. But it is dangerous.
The Newsweek article mentions in passing that Cambridge Analytics, the firm doing the data manipulation for the Trump campaign, has received a $500,000 State Department contract to study the impact of "foreign propaganda". Aside from the obvious issue of crony politics, one wonders how long before the Trump administration, or some other government officials, decide they need to start using big data and "microtargeting". They, of course, will have more tools at their disposal. Not only will they be able to lean on data repositories like Facebook and Twitter and demand information on their users (do you trust that big companies will consistently stand up and oppose such "requests"?), they already have massive amounts of data on people collected and stored by myriad government agencies – NSA and other intelligence agencies with their records of calls, emails and texts, the IRS and its tax records, Medicare and its health records, other agencies with educational records, travel information, FBI files, firearms license applications, and much, much more data at their disposal. Imagine what targeted control they could exert if all that information were to be correlated, analyzed, and used for individualized propaganda, or for conveyance of warnings about illegal activity, etc.
Libertarians will be in a much stronger place to speak out against any such efforts if we have clean hands ourselves, and if we have already been speaking out about non-consensual corporate harvesting of big data for the relatively benign purpose of selling us stuff, making money from the information they obtain and use without our consent.
Sure, big data may increase our chances of finding a cute dress or shoes we like (sorry, Caryn Ann!) if we continue to choose convenience over privacy (do you know what information that app in your phone is collecting on you?). But if too many people consistently make that choice, it will move society as a whole that much closer to an Orwellian future. When governments start building big big data on people, much of the public will be like, "Oh, who cares, companies have been doing that for years." Most ordinary people won't think it's a big deal – until one day for them it is, at which point it may be too late to stop.
Love & Liberty,
((( starchild )))
At-Large Representative, Libertarian National Committee
RealReform at earthlink.net
(415) 625-FREE
@StarchildSF
On Jul 13, 2017, at 11:18 AM, Caryn Ann Harlos wrote:
> Yes I agree with Ken. I enthusiastically love the better sales ads. I would actually like better political ads to issues I actually care about.
>
> It is a tool - for good and for evil. A resolution to use ethically I could support.
>
> -Caryn Ann
>
> On Thu, Jul 13, 2017 at 1:07 PM, Ken Moellman <lpky at mu-net.org> wrote:
> We're already cultivating and using "Big Data" in the broad sense. Professionally, I work in Enterprise Storage and Backup. "Big Data" lives in my realm. So let's define "Big Data" both technically and colloquially.
>
> Technically, "Big Data" is the ability to cross-reference disparate sources of data, stored in disparate formats, to make data conversion and extrapolation more easy. In the past, we would transform data to fit inside a rigid set of parameters. Today, we can just cross-reference data across disparate types. So for instance, the voter tracking system I created in LPKY is NOT "Big Data" because I normalized the format of all of the data prior to combining it into one large database. Big Data would say that I should have just had data sources and had some software on top to correlate the data.
>
> Colloquially, "Big Data" is about data collection and retention, and use the data to determine certain likely behaviors or attributes. How this is applied can vary. From a private sector standpoint, this is tailored marketing to people. Typically, private organizations continue to be divorced from the individual - we don't know these people unless they decide to further engage with us. However, "Big Data" from a criminal justice standpoint is profiling and then tracking individual actions of specific people without due process. There's quite a disparity between the public and private aspects.
>
> As an organization, like any other private organization, the use of "micro-targeting" is about efficiency in marketing. Instead of broadcasting general messages, we send the particular message most likely to convert an individual to libertarianism directly to that individual. There is nothing inherently wrong with micro-targeting. We identify a person's hot-button issues and lead our messaging to them with that hot-button issue.
>
> Like a firearm, "Big Data" itself isn't inherently evil. It's how you use it that determines morality. If we're using it to doxx people, that's bad. If we're using it to spy on the specifics of a person's private life, that's bad. But if we're doing it just to try to lead with a successful marketing message, that's not evil. If anything, it saves donor money. (And in the private for-profit sector, it lowers consumer costs.) These are good things.
>
>
>
> On Thu, Jul 13, 2017 at 1:41 PM, David Demarest <dprattdemarest at gmail.com> wrote:
> Caryn Ann,
>
> Agreed, Big Data in private hands has tremendous potential as an information service providing free data that can be voluntarily used or ignored.
>
> However, Big Data is a huge risk in the hands of authorities and bloated corporations that rely on government preferences to avoid competition and are complicit in authoritarian surveillance efforts.
>
> Thoughts?
>
> On Jul 13, 2017 12:26 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
>
> 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” 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, 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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> --
> 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
> Communications Director, Libertarian Party of Colorado
> Colorado State Coordinator, Libertarian Party Radical Caucus
> Chair, LP Historical Preservation Committee
>
> A haiku to the Statement of Principles:
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> And oppose the use of force
> Taxation is theft
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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
> Communications Director, Libertarian Party of Colorado
> Colorado State Coordinator, Libertarian Party Radical Caucus
> 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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