How Cambridge Analytica turned Facebook ‘likes’ into a lucrative political tool
The algorithm used in the Facebook data breach trawled though personal data for information on sexual orientation, race, gender – and even intelligence and childhood trauma
The algorithm at the heart of the Facebook data breach sounds almost too dystopian to be real. It trawls through the most apparently trivial, throwaway postings –the “likes” users dole out as they browse the site – to gather sensitive personal information about sexual orientation, race, gender, even intelligence and childhood trauma.
A few dozen “likes” can give a strong prediction of which party a user will vote for, reveal their gender and whether their partner is likely to be a man or woman, provide powerful clues about whether their parents stayed together throughout their childhood and predict their vulnerability to substance abuse. And it can do all this without delving into personal messages, posts, status updates, photos or all the other information Facebook holds.
Some results may sound more like the result of updated online sleuthing than sophisticated data analysis; “liking” a political campaign page is little different from pinning a poster in a window.
But five years ago psychology researchers showed that far more complex traits could be deduced from patterns invisible to a human observer scanning through profiles. Just a few apparently random “likes” could form the basis for disturbingly complex character assessments.
When users liked “curly fries” and Sephora cosmetics, this was said to give clues to intelligence; Hello Kitty likes indicated political views; “Being confused after waking up from naps” was linked to sexuality. These were just some of the unexpected but consistent correlations noted in a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal in 2013. “Few users were associated with ‘likes’ explicitly revealing their attributes. For example, less than 5% of users labelled as gay were connected with explicitly gay groups, such as No H8 Campaign,” the peer-reviewed research found.
The researchers, Michal Kosinski, David Stillwell and Thore Graepel, saw the dystopian potential of the study and raised privacy concerns. At the time Facebook “likes” were public by default.
“The predictability of individual attributes from digital records of behaviour may have considerable negative implications, because it can easily be applied to large numbers of people without their individual consent and without them noticing,” they said.
“Commercial companies, governmental institutions, or even your Facebook friends could use software to infer attributes such as intelligence, sexual orientation or political views that an individual may not have intended to share.”
To some, that may have sounded like a business opportunity. By early 2014, Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix had signed a deal with one of Kosinski’s Cambridge colleagues, lecturer Aleksandr Kogan, for a private commercial venture, separate from Kogan’s duties at the university, but echoing Kosinski’s work.
The academic had developed a Facebook app which featured a personality quiz, and Cambridge Analytica paid for people to take it, advertising on platforms such as Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.
The app recorded the results of each quiz, collected data from the taker’s Facebook account – and, crucially, extracted the data of their Facebook friends as well.
The results were paired with each quiz-taker’s Facebook data to seek out patterns and build an algorithm to predict results for other Facebook users. Their friends’ profiles provided a testing ground for the formula and, more crucially, a resource that would make the algorithm politically valuable.
To be eligible to take the test the user had to have a Facebook account and be a US voter, so tens of millions of the profiles could be matched to electoral rolls. From an initial trial of 1,000 “seeders”, the researchers obtained 160,000 profiles – or about 160 per person. Eventually a few hundred thousand paid test-takers would be the key to data from a vast swath of US voters.
It was extremely attractive. It could also be deemed illicit, primarily because Kogan did not have permission to collect or use data for commercial purposes. His permission from Facebook to harvest profiles in large quantities was specifically restricted to academic use. And although the company at the time allowed apps to collect friend data, it was only for use in the context of Facebook itself, to encourage interaction. Selling data on, or putting it to other purposes, – including Cambridge Analytica’s political marketing – was strictly barred.
It also appears likely the project was breaking British data protection laws, which ban sale or use of personal data without consent. That includes cases where consent is given for one purpose but data is used for another.
The paid test-takers signed up to T&Cs, including collection of their own data, and Facebook’s default terms allowed their friends’ data to be collected by an app, unless their privacy settings allowed this. But none of them agreed to their data possibly being used to create a political marketing tool or to it being placed in a vast campaign database.
Kogan maintains everything he did was legal and says he had a “close working relationship” with Facebook, which had granted him permission for his apps.
Facebook denies this was a data breach. Vice-president Paul Grewal said: “Protecting people’s information is at the heart of everything we do, and we require the same from people who operate apps on Facebook. If these reports are true, it’s a serious abuse of our rules.”
The scale of the data collection Cambridge Analytica paid for was so large it triggered an automatic shutdown of the app’s ability to harvest profiles. But Kogan told a colleague he “spoke with an engineer” to get the restriction lifted and, within a day or two, work resumed.
Within months, Kogan and Cambridge Analytica had a database of millions of US voters that had its own algorithm to scan them, identifying likely political persuasions and personality traits. They could then decide who to target and craft their messages that was likely to appeal to them – a political approach known as “micro-targeting”.
Facebook announced on Friday that it was suspending Cambridge Analytica and Kogan from the platform pending information over misuse of data related to this project.
Facebook denies that the harvesting of tens of millions of profiles by GSR and Cambridge Analytica was a data breach. It said in a statement that Kogan “gained access to this information in a legitimate way and through the proper channels” but “did not subsequently abide by our rules” because he passed the information onto third parties.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/17/facebook-cambridge-analytica-kogan-data-algorithm
My Comments :
1.
The Trump super PAC-master, and Jewish zionist Robert Mercer (*) - himself made a
billionaire by applying programmed algorithms (rather than gambling
driven human intuition) to discover the most profitable investment
trends in stock market funds - took a majority share at Cambridge
Analytica (CA) and installed Bannon on the Board of Directors.
2.
With the STOLEN (by someone with a suspect nationality) concept - and
its application concentrated on the so-called Swing States, where
micro-targeting of voters could make the difference - Mercer & Co
subsequently went on, against all odds, to win the presidential
elections for the most unlikely candidate of the century.
3.
Micro-targeting had not only been used for influencing those who -
according to the ICT program-weighed data, composed of not only
likes, but also of all kinds of other data that had been bought by
Mercer et al. from a great number of sources - already tended to lean
towards Trump (and the GOP), but also to approach those voters, that
tended to vote for Clinton and the Democrats.
4.
The latter group had been targeted by the people of CA in order to
try to a. either stop them to vote at all, or b. to seduce them to
vote for Trump / GOP.
5.
The word seduce is the right term to use in this context, for
micro-targeting - just as many classical sophisticated advertising
messages are pretending - did not only colour the exact messages that
voters were offered, to try to make them vote one way or the other,
but it did so on a stealth, subconscious manner.
6.
Dependent on the outcome of the (automated) constructed personal
psychological profiles, the voter most literally was brainwashed into
their own choice-making process, to make them act in the way, the
Trump campaign wanted them to vote.
7.
So, together with another Mercer owned company - i.e. the "alt-right"
Breitbart news outlet, that also had been provided for by Mercer, of
an effective white-supremacist ideologue, Bannon - that had been
broadcasting a lot of politically motivated dog-whistling messages to
its audience, Mercer and Co did factually gained the key to White
House and to Congress (for this tool had also been used for the
(partly) to be elected Houses of Congress).
8.
The use of those two crucial power-keys permitted Mercer et al. to -
not only chose carefully who would be acquiring what job in the WH
(including the Trump administration, but as well to) - determine the
exact set of policies, that would have to to be executed by Trump and
his team.
9.
Although it has yet to be scientifically researched / detremined, what percentage
of the election victory might be contributed to the factors I
mentioned before - such as the electrifyingly powerful combination of
both CA and Breitbart (among other political tools such as
old-fashioned election addresses / political rallies by the main candidate Trump) - at
this stage one has to seriously reckon with the probability, that
without those tow major factors, Trump might not have won the
presidential elections and the GOP might not have gained a majority
in both Congressional Houses.
10.
Whether there might have been a Russian factor into the USA election
activities of the CA company, has also yet to be established, but
Mercer had entertained relations with Russian elements in the past,
and as we know, there is a major mutual attraction (exchange /
cooperation) between the ultra ethno-nationalists on the Russian side
of the political equation and the their USA counterparts.
11. However, there is also another ehtno-nationalist factor involved into the USA election, and that factor had been accentuated (not necessarily introduced) by the arrival of the Jewish-Supremacist son in law of Trump, Jared Kushner, who, to the surprise of many observers, had been handed over the hyper-sensitive portfolio of main "USA Peace Envoy of the ME".
11. However, there is also another ehtno-nationalist factor involved into the USA election, and that factor had been accentuated (not necessarily introduced) by the arrival of the Jewish-Supremacist son in law of Trump, Jared Kushner, who, to the surprise of many observers, had been handed over the hyper-sensitive portfolio of main "USA Peace Envoy of the ME".
12.
As final contributing factor I have to mention the peculiar fact,
that there can be established a highly remarkable link between Cambridge
Analytica - via the London based CA parent group SCL - and the USA /
some security agencies.
13.
After all, the SCL group in the recent past had been closely
associated - as a commercial defense contractor - with the NATO /
CIA, in order to help them win elections in the African continent by
way of regime change by software, in stead of the usual practise of
regime change by military hardware.
14.
So (both the decisive Brexit campaign and) the regime changing USA
election campaign had been dominated by an entity (CA), that is
(in)directly connected to NATO / CIA political electioneering
programs.
15. This
realisation does - i.a. observations - add a highly unexpected
dimension to the Mueller investigation into a possible collusion
between the Trump team and the Kremlin, and well in the sense that
the most influential factor into the 2016 presidential and
Congressional elections might be not only be claimed by "the
Russians", but might as well be claimed by a possible (possibly
rogue) coterie from within the USA security apparatus itself.
16. What exact role the owners of (a
majority stock in) Facebook have been playing into the political
weaponization of Facebook is also a factor that needs to be
investigated in high priority of order, because lately some
incriminating data has been published on the alleged way, zio-Jewish Zuckerberg
and Co allowed foreign regimes to manipulate the highly effective FB tool for their
own political advantage.
17. In this respect - the brainwashing ("the manufacturing of
consent" / dissent) of the human mind by Artificial Intelligence or AI (be it at this
stage, instigated by a part of the all too human political and
economical elite) - the ominous prediction from the late genius
Stephen Hawking, that AI might become the most threatening factor in
the future for the total destruction of the Human Species, might
have already started to have been materialising today....
(*) Borh Jewish zionist Mercer an jew-supremacist Sheldon Adelson poured millions of dollars in their respective super-PAC/s for White supremacist Trump, in order to generate the maximum their political influence on the USA political agenda and on the composition of the Trump administration and the WH staff. and one might conclude that they succeeded beyond any expectation...
