PRIVACY, ACCOUNTABILITY, AND ACCESS IN THE AGE OF THE PERSONALIZED CAMPAIGN

Tarun Wadhwa@twadhwa

November 1st, 2013PLEAD 2013

How we are identified is changing• We create, disclose, and share more information about

ourselves than at any time in history• Social media, digital lifestyles, metadata

• Personal information is becoming centralized• Data miners, silos coming down, and the plummeting cost of storage and

retrieval

• Your world is becoming who you are, how you’re defined• Personalization and the race for “the new oil”

What you made possible• Core functions: healthcare insurance, background checks,

financial transactions – basically, things that involve trust

But also…• An entire ecosystem where your personal information and

history is a currency traded in exchange for services that seem free• Your information can now be processed by machine to render

judgments about you, what you’re like, and what you might do• While you have little to no control over how these judgments

are made and how they might effect you

Your data and your future• By getting to know you, the systems and institutions you

interact with have the chance to offer you services that are more relevant to your needs• But by knowing your needs, they can categorize and sort you

into whatever classifications they deem appropriate• You will never get to see your “personal file” – you have no

claim or ownership of it

“Targeting” in the private sector• Big data has revolutionized the way that brands interact with,

track, and reach out to their customers• In an (in)famous example, Target was able to determine

whether a teenage girl was pregnant before her own family (NYT)• Assigned each customer an ID number based on identifying piece of

information (credit card, name, e-mail address, home address)• Collects information of everything they’ve bought and any demographic

information they can get a hold of• Look at historical buying data for other people in similar demographics• Look for patterns in when things are purchased and when life events

occur

Around the world, it’s the same story• Technology is being used to enable billions of people to receive

recognition for the first time in history• We have our best shot in history of reducing corruption and

creating a more transparent, effective form of governance • But our civilian systems are always a step behind while our

security systems are advanced

What does our government prioritize?

Why is the Department of Motor Vehicles such a mess in a nation that has built the largest, most

comprehensive surveillance state in human history?

Why is it that our voter targeting is cutting edge, but our voter registration processes have lacked any real

innovation for decades?

Voter targeting itself is nothing newIn 1897 William Jennings Bryan built a database of 200,000 index cards

tracking things like a person's religion, income, party affiliation, and occupation of everyone his failed campaign had correspondence with

• Early stages, worked well for Bush in 2004• Earlier databases such as Voter Vault, Catalist, and Aristotle

played vital in many elections• Contribution history has been helpful in determining likelihood

future contribution• Main uses: fundraising, recruitment, issue tracking, get out the

vote efforts

Joe Trippi in MIT Technology Review• Most advanced technology in 1979 – “the telephone call

combined with meticulous use of three-by-five index cards”• “An index card would be created with the voter’s name, address, and

phone number—and a code number for the person’s answer to that one question”

• “…would give way to computer-generated printouts over time, but the basic coding system in politics stayed the same” – Until Obama’s 2012 campaign

• A focus on television led to “politics started to lose its soul, which is the active participation of ordinary voters in elections.”

• Big data “allowed the campaign to rebuild that winning coalition, vote by vote”

Why voter targeting matters• A relatively small group of people end up deciding the outcome

of elections – not the popular vote• People who vote, are engaged• Swing states and targeting by geography• “Independents” and those who happen to live in swing districts

• In the 2000 presidential campaign, hundreds of millions of dollars were spent on reaching just 7 percent of voters -- less than 8 million people

• Get out the vote efforts can make an enormous difference for a candidate – often, it can be the deciding factor

What information is being used• Information already collected previously• Public records: local, state, and federal records• Party registration, voting history, political donations, vehicle registration,

real estate records• Commercial information: magazine subscriptions, credit

history, purchasing history, etc.• Internet and social data – “data exhaust”

From “300 distinct bits on each voter in 2004 to more than 900 today” (The Atlantic)

What “microtargeting” makes possible• “Inside microtargeting offices in Washington and across the

nation, individual voters are today coming through in HDTV clarity -- every single digitally-active American consumer, which is 91 percent of us, according to Pew Internet research. Political strategists buy consumer information from data brokers, mash it up with voter records and online behavior, then run the seemingly-mundane minutiae of modern life -- most-visited websites, which soda's in the fridge -- through complicated algorithms and: pow!”• - Willie Desmond, Strategic Telemetry to The Atlantic

Source: National Media Research Planning & Placement

Source: National Media Research Planning & Placement

It’s become a lot easier to track you• Campaigns using some of the same tactics as online marketers

– trick you into giving up way more information than you realized by burying it in the terms of service• Using cookies to track you across the internet to measure your

interests and behavior• Mobile phones are ubiquitous, consumers have a very shallow

understanding of how much data these devices create• The myth of anonymous data collection

Reaching you in the real world• The tools used by on-the-ground organizers, volunteers now far

more sophisticated than ever before – ease of use changes everything

Source: ProPublica

Pandering gets social• In addition to mining your social media posts, your network is

being analyzed to see what your friends can reveal about you• You don’t even have to be involved to be a part of the system• Belief that if only people heard the right message for them,

then they could become a supporter

Source: http://media4.s-nbcnews.com/j/streams/2013/June/130621/6C7973648-121001-social-media-politics-5p.blocks_desktop_large.jpg

The “filter bubble” comes to politics• Eli Pariser focused on Google, Facebook, but the larger trend is

coming to other areas as well• We’ve always sought out media particular to our interests –

now that’s being done for us• “Confirmation bias” and political discourse

Source: http://derekdevries.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/filterbubble.jpg

Preaching to the choir• “In recent primary states, Romney aired two very different ads

on local news websites: one for supporters, and another for those who may not support him. This sort of thing could pop up on television as well very soon. Within five years, Will Feltus of the National Media predicts, advertisers and politicians will only target households where the messages can have maximum effect” – Terrence McCoy, The Atlantic

What will it do to our national political discourse when we are not even hearing the same messages?

Americans still haven’t come around• This election, both campaigns broke new ground on the use of

big data, but targeting remains unpopular with the public

“68% of internet users agree with a statement that they are not okay with targeted advertising because they don’t like having

their online behavior tracked and analyzed; 28% backed a statement that they are okay with targeted advertising because

it means they see advertisements and get information about things they are really interested in” – Pew Internet, 2012

Democratization of voter targeting• The value and quality of a database• These same types of tactics will seep down to lower levels and

smaller elections • Example of United in Purpose (NPR):• Evangelical Christian non-profit• Scores people based on whether they like NASCAR, fishing – whether

they are anti-abortion or support traditional marriage• Attributes turned into points, if over 600 points considered “serious

about their faith”• They will be contacted if they have not registered to vote

New barriers to entry• On the other hand, the best databases are still controlled by

the largest parties• Daniel Kreiss in Stanford Law Review on negative potential long

term consequences:• “Political data and the consulting services necessary to render it

actionable are not cheap. Wealthy candidates and those with deep-pocketed allies have a competitive advantage in their ability to purchase comprehensive voter data and sophisticated modeling and targeting services. Minor party and insurgent candidates within parties have comparatively fewer resources to spend on these services. Even the prices parties charge their own candidates to access their voter files can be prohibitively expensive. For example, the Iowa Democratic Party charged its presidential candidates $100,000 to access its data in 2008.”

Crowdsourced attempts to capture ads• ProPublica’s Message Machine was a fantastic start – but we

need to grow this considerably• Over 500 readers submitted >10,000 ads

There are several major questions that must be addressed in order for these technologies and tactics to be used

responsibly in the future

Who gets to access your information? - Voters currently have no real option to limit or control – or

even know – who else their data is being shared with- Should this be something that each candidate is responsible

for, or should it be done at the party level?- Is there any way to restrict what information is held by whom?

"As a voter, I would feel a lot more comfortable if campaigns gave voters the option of whether or not they could pass their information on to other groups” – Andrew Rasiej, founder of

Personal Democracy Forum and TechPresident

Should we set limits? • What happens when this type of

personal targeting apparatus is applied to wedge issues?• What happens when we appeal not

to what were interested in, but to what we fear?• Who gets to decide what issues are

fair game? Running a blanket TV commercial is far different from tailoring an ad or message that follows you around the internet.

Source: The Washington Post

Who is going to protect your information?

• Centralized databases are “honeypots” for hackers – and even the largest, most sophisticated security companies face threats from hackers• While it is true that most of the information campaigns

collecting can be found in other places, there is a risk in aggregating it and making it vulnerable given scale• There are better and worse ways to store this data and allow

others to access it, but when you have no right to know, you can never be sure what practices used• Can a group of political experts really be expected to be top

notch at cyber security as well?

Also, there is no way to opt-out• A few times, there have been different

proposals for political “Do Not Call” list – but we need to reconsider this and take it seriously• A large segment of the population doesn’t care to be

bothered with political messages• There is a reasonable debate over whether

voting is a civic duty… but is engaging in the process and being targeted by messages a civic duty?

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/

File:US-DoNotCallRegistry-Logo.svg

What value are we placing on privacy?• Political views rarely remain constant through lifetime, privacy

allows us the ability to grow and develop our own views• How opinions are formed is just as important as the fact that

they are there• When everything is automatically recorded, measured, and

categorized it becomes far more difficult to explore new positions or experiment with other political views• Will freedom of speech and association undergo irreparable

harm in the age of social media?• There may be no credible harm yet – but vast majority of

people not aware this is going on, technologies advancing

Obama, privacy, and regulation• Despite the revelations of the last few months, there have been

several times when the President has spoke of the need to protect our privacy online• In 2012, proposed a “Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights”• But his campaign worked with some of these types of firms;

questions over whether his own staff’s efforts would be restricted under such regulation• Same principles suggested for private industry would be helpful

for campaigns to adopt:• Transparency, respect for context, security, access and accuracy, focused

collection, accountability• Larger need to update privacy laws, framework outdated

What lies ahead four years from now?• How much more data will we create?• Images, video uploaded• Location data• Social content created

• How will the ecosystem change?• Further centralization• Greater sharing, more players

• What new types of data will be created?• Health information• Deeper social graph• Greater reliance on cloud storage

“Voters expect to be able to obsessively analyze information about the candidates, not the other way around”- Tim Murphy

Who are we building these systems for?