violet wrote:some of you are already well aware of this of course . This is an interesting read ... click on the link to read the full (fairly long) article.
The Data That Turned the World Upside Down
Written by Hannes Grassegger and Mikael Krogerus
January 28, 2017 // 09:15 AM EST
.Psychologist Michal Kosinski developed a method to analyze people in minute detail based on their Facebook activity. Did a similar tool help propel Donald Trump to victory? Two reporters from Zurich-based Das Magazin (where an earlier version of this story appeared in December in German) went data-gathering.
On November 9 at around 8.30 AM., Michal Kosinski woke up in the Hotel Sunnehus in Zurich. The 34-year-old researcher had come to give a lecture at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) about the dangers of Big Data and the digital revolution. Kosinski gives regular lectures on this topic all over the world. He is a leading expert in psychometrics, a data-driven sub-branch of psychology. When he turned on the TV that morning, he saw that the bombshell had exploded: contrary to forecasts by all leading statisticians, Donald J. Trump had been elected president of the United States.
For a long time, Kosinski watched the Trump victory celebrations and the results coming in from each state. He had a hunch that the outcome of the election might have something to do with his research. Finally, he took a deep breath and turned off the TV.
On the same day, a then little-known British company based in London sent out a press release: “We are thrilled that our revolutionary approach to data-driven communication has played such an integral part in President-elect Trump’s extraordinary win,” Alexander James Ashburner Nix was quoted as saying. Nix is British, 41 years old, and CEO of Cambridge Analytica. He is always immaculately turned out in tailor-made suits and designer glasses, with his wavy blonde hair combed back from his forehead. His company wasn't just integral to Trump’s online campaign, but to the UK's Brexit campaign as well.
Of these three players—reflective Kosinski, carefully groomed Nix and grinning Trump—one of them enabled the digital revolution, one of them executed it and one of them benefited from it.
How dangerous is big data?
Anyone who has not spent the last five years living on another planet will be familiar with the term Big Data. Big Data means, in essence, that everything we do, both on and offline, leaves digital traces. Every purchase we make with our cards, every search we type into Google, every movement we make when our mobile phone is in our pocket, every “like” is stored. Especially every “like.” For a long time, it was not entirely clear what use this data could have—except, perhaps, that we might find ads for high blood pressure remedies just after we’ve Googled “reduce blood pressure.”
On November 9, it became clear that maybe much more is possible. The company behind Trump’s online campaign—the same company that had worked for Leave.EU in the very early stages of its "Brexit" campaign—was a Big Data company: Cambridge Analytica.
To understand the outcome of the election—and how political communication might work in the future—we need to begin with a strange incident at Cambridge University in 2014, at Kosinski’s Psychometrics Center.
Psychometrics, sometimes also called psychographics, focuses on measuring psychological traits, such as personality. In the 1980s, two teams of psychologists developed a model that sought to assess human beings based on five personality traits, known as the “Big Five.” These are: openness (how open you are to new experiences?), conscientiousness (how much of a perfectionist are you?), extroversion (how sociable are you?), agreeableness (how considerate and cooperative you are?) and neuroticism (are you easily upset?). Based on these dimensions—they are also known as OCEAN, an acronym for openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, neuroticism—we can make a relatively accurate assessment of the kind of person in front of us. This includes their needs and fears, and how they is likely to behave. The ”Big Five” has become the standard technique of psychometrics. But for a long time, the problem with this approach was data collection, because it involved filling out a complicated, highly personal questionnaire. Then came the Internet. And Facebook. And Kosinski.
Michal Kosinski was a student in Warsaw when his life took a new direction in 2008. He was accepted by Cambridge University to do his PhD at the Psychometrics Centre, one of the oldest institutions of this kind worldwide. Kosinski joined fellow student David Stillwell (now a lecturer at Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge) about a year after Stillwell had launched a little Facebook application in the days when the platform had not yet become the behemoth it is today. Their MyPersonality app enabled users to fill out different psychometric questionnaires, including a handful of psychological questions from the Big Five personality questionnaire (“I panic easily,“ “I contradict others”). Based on the evaluation, users received a “personality profile”—individual Big Five values—and could opt-in to share their Facebook profile data with the researchers.
Followers of Lady Gaga were most probably extroverts, while those who “liked” philosophy tended to be introverts.
Kosinski had expected a few dozen college friends to fill in the questionnaire, but before long, hundreds, thousands, then millions of people had revealed their innermost convictions. Suddenly, the two doctoral candidates owned the largest dataset combining psychometric scores with Facebook profiles ever to be collected.
The approach that Kosinski and his colleagues developed over the next few years was actually quite simple. First, they provided test subjects with a questionnaire in the form of an online quiz. From their responses, the psychologists calculated the personal Big Five values of respondents. Kosinski’s team then compared the results with all sorts of other online data from the subjects: what they “liked," shared or posted on Facebook, or what gender, age, place of residence they specified, for example. This enabled the researchers to connect the dots and make correlations.
Remarkably reliable deductions could be drawn from simple online actions. For example, men who “liked” the cosmetics brand MAC were slightly more likely to be gay; one of the best indicators for heterosexuality was “liking” Wu-Tang Clan. Followers of Lady Gaga were most probably extroverts, while those who “liked” philosophy tended to be introverts. While each piece of such information is too weak to produce a reliable prediction, when tens, hundreds, or thousands of individual data points are combined, the resulting predictions become really accurate.
Kosinski and his team tirelessly refined their models. In 2012, Kosinski proved that on the basis of an average of 68 Facebook “likes” by a user, it was possible to predict their skin color (with 95 percent accuracy), their sexual orientation (88 percent accuracy), and their affiliation to the Democratic or Republican party (85 percent). But it didn’t stop there. Intelligence, religious affiliation, as well as alcohol, cigarette and drug use, could all be determined. From the data it was even possible to deduce whether deduce whether someone's parents were divorced.
The strength of their modeling was illustrated by how well it could predict a subject’s answers. Kosinski continued to work on the models incessantly: before long, he was able to evaluate a person better than the average work colleague, merely on the basis of ten Facebook “likes.” Seventy “likes” were enough to outdo what a person’s friends knew, 150 what their parents knew, and 300 “likes” what their partner knew. More “likes” could even surpass what a person thought they knew about themselves. On the day that Kosinski published these findings, he received two phone calls. The threat of a lawsuit and a job offer. Both from Facebook.
Only weeks later Facebook “likes“ became private by default. Before that, the default setting was that anyone on the internet could see your "likes." But this was no obstacle to data collectors: while Kosinski always asked for the consent of Facebook users, many apps and online quizzes today require access to private data as a precondition for taking personality tests. (Anybody who wants to evaluate themselves based on their Facebook “likes” can do so on Kosinski’s website, and then compare their results to those of a classic Ocean questionnaire, like that of the Cambridge Psychometrics Center.)
Our smartphone, Kosinski concluded, is a vast psychological questionnaire that we are constantly filling out, both consciously and unconsciously.
But it was not just about “likes” or even Facebook: Kosinski and his team could now ascribe Big Five values based purely on how many profile pictures a person has on Facebook, or how many contacts they have (a good indicator of extraversion). But we also reveal something about ourselves even when we’re not online. For example, the motion sensor on our phone reveals how quickly we move and how far we travel (this correlates with emotional instability). Our smartphone, Kosinski concluded, is a vast psychological questionnaire that we are constantly filling out, both consciously and unconsciously.
Above all, however—and this is key—it also works in reverse: not only can psychological profiles be created from your data, but your data can also be used the other way round to search for specific profiles: all anxious fathers, all angry introverts, for example—or maybe even all undecided Democrats? Essentially, what Kosinski had invented was sort of a people search engine. He started to recognize the potential—but also the inherent danger—of his work.
To him, the internet had always seemed like a gift from heaven. What he really wanted was to give something back, to share. Data can be copied, so why shouldn’t everyone benefit from it? It was the spirit of a whole generation, the beginning of a new era that transcended the limitations of the physical world. But what would happen, wondered Kosinski, if someone abused his people search engine to manipulate people? He began to add warnings to most of his scientific work. His approach, he warned, “could pose a threat to an individual’s well-being, freedom, or even life.” But no one seemed to grasp what he meant.
Around this time, in early 2014, Kosinski was approached by a young assistant professor in the psychology department called Aleksandr Kogan. He said he was inquiring on behalf of a company that was interested in Kosinski’s method, and wanted to access the MyPersonality database. Kogan wasn’t at liberty to reveal for what purpose; he was bound to secrecy.
At first, Kosinski and his team considered this offer, as it would mean a great deal of money for the institute, but then he hesitated. Finally, Kosinski remembers, Kogan revealed the name of the company: SCL, or Strategic Communication Laboratories. Kosinski Googled the company: “[We are] the premier election management agency,” says the company’s website. SCL provides marketing based on psychological modeling. One of its core focuses: Influencing elections. Influencing elections? Perturbed, Kosinski clicked through the pages. What kind of company was this? And what were these people planning?
What Kosinski did not know at the time: SCL is the parent of a group of companies. Who exactly owns SCL and its diverse branches is unclear, thanks to a convoluted corporate structure, the type seen in the UK Companies House, the Panama Papers, and the Delaware company registry. Some of the SCL offshoots have been involved in elections from Ukraine to Nigeria, helped the Nepalese monarch against the rebels, whereas others have developed methods to influence Eastern European and Afghan citizens for NATO. And, in 2013, SCL spun off a new company to participate in US elections: Cambridge Analytica
keep reading: http://motherboard.vice.com/read/big-da ... exit-trump
Big Data, Psychology, Brexit and the US election
- violet
- Suspicious Little Mad Woman
- Reactions: 289
- Posts: 19709
- Joined: Mon Nov 30, 2009 9:48 pm
- Location: About as far away as can be.
Big Data, Psychology, Brexit and the US election
Nevermind, I'll do it myself. Reposted here as one of the admin/mods decided to move it to the 3am attentions seeking thread
The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled.
- Plutarch
- Plutarch
- batshitcrazyweirdo
- Batshit Crazy Weirdo
- Reactions: 3
- Posts: 17313
- Joined: Wed May 27, 2015 3:24 pm
- Location: Bat Cave
My opinion would be to stop reading and start evaluating.
Youz betta be reading what is being signed as executive orders, what they mean, how strong they are, and how many more are to come, and what for.
Just sayin n shit.
Youz betta be reading what is being signed as executive orders, what they mean, how strong they are, and how many more are to come, and what for.
Just sayin n shit.
I love bitches n gonna fuck Texas and the USA+ right up their god damn ass! Hallelujah!
- violet
- Suspicious Little Mad Woman
- Reactions: 289
- Posts: 19709
- Joined: Mon Nov 30, 2009 9:48 pm
- Location: About as far away as can be.
why bother? seriously. nothing I read or do will make one iota of difference. I used to believe that one person can make a difference. bullshit... unless that one person is trying to make a negative, power hungry, money chasing difference.... only then will what I do make one blind bit of difference to trump's world.
The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled.
- Plutarch
- Plutarch
- batshitcrazyweirdo
- Batshit Crazy Weirdo
- Reactions: 3
- Posts: 17313
- Joined: Wed May 27, 2015 3:24 pm
- Location: Bat Cave
Please do not take offense. These orders are being issued. Do not take them lightly. They are called executive orders. They mean business.
The media is trying to bring Trump down. Hard and fast.
He has other plans. And as the president of the USA and the most powerful nation on the planet ... he ain't takin shit.
So suck it up.
Besides, you know you love it. The drama, the weirdness. Kinda reminds me of K440.
Just sayin n shit.
The media is trying to bring Trump down. Hard and fast.
He has other plans. And as the president of the USA and the most powerful nation on the planet ... he ain't takin shit.
So suck it up.
Besides, you know you love it. The drama, the weirdness. Kinda reminds me of K440.
Just sayin n shit.
I love bitches n gonna fuck Texas and the USA+ right up their god damn ass! Hallelujah!
That's what she said...batshitcrazyweirdo wrote:Hard and fast.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXlkmPXDvqU
If you don't know where you're going, any road takes you there.
Can't find the original thread for this. Maybe something to do with the mods?
Anyhow, for all those people that thought Brexit and Trump using Cambridge Analytica was for the silver hat brigade
From today's Guardian
Watchdog to launch inquiry into misuse of data in politics
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ ... exit-trump
Anyhow, for all those people that thought Brexit and Trump using Cambridge Analytica was for the silver hat brigade
From today's Guardian
Watchdog to launch inquiry into misuse of data in politics
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ ... exit-trump
The UK’s privacy watchdog is launching an inquiry into how voters’ personal data is being captured and exploited in political campaigns, cited as a key factor in both the Brexit and Trump victories last year.
The intervention by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) follows revelations in last week’s Observer that a technology company part-owned by a US billionaire played a key role in the campaign to persuade Britons to vote to leave the European Union.
Analysis Did Cambridge Analytica influence the Brexit vote and the US election?
Nigel Oakes’s company is at the centre of a growing controversy over the use of personal data during elections. But is there any evidence that what it does works?
Read more
It comes as privacy campaigners, lawyers, politicians and technology experts express fears that electoral laws are not keeping up with the pace of technological change.
“We are conducting a wide assessment of the data-protection risks arising from the use of data analytics, including for political purposes, and will be contacting a range of organisations,” an ICO spokeswoman confirmed. “We intend to publicise our findings later this year.”
The ICO spokeswoman confirmed that it had approached Cambridge Analytica over its apparent use of data following the story in the Observer. “We have concerns about Cambridge Analytica’s reported use of personal data and we are in contact with the organisation,” she said.
The company, which has offices in London, New York and Washington, uses data analysis to build up sophisticated profiles of individuals to predict how they might vote. Reportedly part-owned by US billionaire Robert Mercer, it claims to have played an influential role in the US election, using its data-crunching ability to identify key swing voters.
...
-
- Similar Topics
- Replies
- Views
- Last post
-
-
EX Pats in Cambodia are ignorant on Brexit
by TheGrimReaper » Mon Sep 02, 2019 1:45 pm » in Cambodia Speakeasy - 70 Replies
- 69882 Views
-
Last post by Petrol Head
Fri Sep 06, 2019 8:22 pm
-
-
-
The New and Improved Expat Brexit Referendum
by kungfufighter » Sat Aug 31, 2019 4:38 pm » in Cambodia Speakeasy - 59 Replies
- 25555 Views
-
Last post by batshitcrazyweirdo
Thu Sep 05, 2019 12:14 am
-
-
-
'The men who plundered Europe': Warning! Brexit related
by kungfufighter » Sat Sep 21, 2019 2:15 pm » in 'Not' Cambodia - 0 Replies
- 2864 Views
-
Last post by kungfufighter
Sat Sep 21, 2019 2:15 pm
-
-
- 40 Replies
- 12864 Views
-
Last post by RobW
Wed Mar 31, 2021 3:08 am