Pols Blur Line Between Data Mining, Cyberstalking 115
theodp writes "Mother Jones reports on Obama's Digital Gurus, the top-secret team of analytics engineers and scientists led by hipster CTO Harper Reed who work on text analytics, social network/media analysis, web personalization, computational advertising, and online experiments & testing from the campaign's Chicago HQ and satellite offices. For OFA (Obama for America), writes Tim Murphy, there is no such thing as Too Much Information. 'In terms of just the sheer amount of data that political candidates have on you,' says UNC Prof Daniel Kreiss, 'I think everyone finds it creepy.' Still playing catch-up to OFA in its data efforts is Team Romney, which reportedly hired former employees from places like Google Analytics, Apple, Ominture, and Overstock.com in an attempt to reverse engineer the Obama campaign's strategy."
Re:What are they using this data for? (Score:4, Interesting)
What happens when these PR goons become the new prateroian guard?
Er, we stand up, yell "Praetorian!," and then wait patiently while he throws his water bottle away, draws his sword, and charges us. Then we stab him to death, steal his horse, and ride to the capital where, after a series of hilarious and tragic blunders and some compulsory phy ed, we kill the emperor.
Re:Promoting Synergistic Synergy (Score:5, Interesting)
text analytics, social network/media analysis, web personalization, computational advertising, and online experiments & testing
What the fuck does any of these even mean?
If you scrap facebook to send out targeted spam, then just say so.
Don't we all pad our resume with important sounding titles for normal everyday jobs?
text analytics means he reads what people type.
social network/media analysis means he goes online.
web personalization means he knows how to upload an avatar to a forum.
computational advertising means he posts his resume online.
online experiments means you sell sex via a webcam.
Re:Obama has to have a special team to do it... (Score:5, Interesting)
...while...your natural gas company...have far more in-depth information on you and far more experience at mining that data - and far, far more interest in seeing Mitt Romney elected...
Do you suppose they even make Romney and the Republicans pay for that data, or just give it to 'em gratis?
Sometimes it seems like they have lots of in-depth information, and sometimes it seems like they're couldn't tell whether I'm warming a cup of milk or cooking dinner for 8 people.
PG&E [pge.com] bills me by the kilowatt hour for my electricity, but they can't seem to get more granular data than a therm [wikipedia.org] (100 cubic feet) when it comes to how much gas I've used. Whether I have my stove on for 5 minutes or 45 minutes, I get charged for 1.02 therms of gas that day. I've methodically tested it. It's only a couple dollars per therm, but if you use your stove every day and they're charging you $2 every time you turn it on versus the 50 cents of gas you're using, they're squeezing an extra $45 a month out of you for gas they still have in the pipeline.
Unless... wait... <SARCASM>are you saying they do know how much of their product they deliver to us? I think you're giving them too much credit.</SARCASM>