Data Miners Liken Obama Voters To Caesars Gamblers 166
theodp writes "As Steve Wozniak publicly laments how government used new technologies he introduced in unintended ways to monitor people, the NY Times reports how the digital masterminds behind the Obama Presidential campaign are cashing in by bringing the secret, technologically advanced formulas used for reaching voters to commercial advertisers. 'The plan is to bring the same Big Data expertise that guided the most expensive presidential campaign in history to companies and nonprofits,' explains Civis Analytics, which is backed by Google Chairman and Obama advisor Eric Schmidt. Also boasting senior members of Obama's campaign team is Analytics Media Group (A.M.G.), which pitched that 'keeping gamblers loyal to Caesars was not all that different from keeping onetime Obama voters from straying to Mitt Romney.' The extent to which the Obama campaign used the newest tech tools to look into people's lives was largely shrouded, the Times reports, but included data mining efforts that triggered Facebook's internal safeguard alarms. ... 'We asked to see [voter's Facebook] photos but really we were looking for who were tagged in photos with you, which was a really great way to dredge up old college friends — and ex-girlfriends.' The Times also explains how the Obama campaign was able to out-optimize the Romney campaign on TV buys by obtaining set-top box TV show viewing information from cable companies for voters on the Obama campaign's 'persuadable voters' list. "
Effectiveness of all of this (Score:3, Interesting)
When Netflix furor broke out about being able to identify a person by the ratings they gave, it turns out that it was only possible when a person had rated an obscure movie (and had cross rated the same movie over different websites).
When Target furor broke out out predicting pregnancy, it was based largely on if you bought a certain type of cream.
I know data mining and such is an attractive but most times it just boils down to some obscure identifier over all the data. Optimizing this and balancing hundreds of factors, does that even work?
Re:That's not why Obama won (Score:3, Interesting)
Oh, pleeeeeeeeeease.....
"The Democrats had the better candidate, in the sense of being able to connect with voters on the campaign trail. Mitt Romney made one gaffe after another during the primary season,"
Obama is a gaffe machine... he said he thought he'd been to 57 states and had one more to visit... he clearly did not know what a navy medic was... he has repeatedly gone to ceremonies honoring dead people and announced that he saw many of those he was there to honor in the audience... on and on and on.... but if you get your news from the mainstream media or comedy central you do not know this stuff because they hide his gaffes just like they hid JFK's numerous affairs and his drug use and just like they hid Bill Clinton's proclivities when he was a candidate (something Chris Matthews admitted on TV during the Lewinski affair). Democrats ridiculed VP candidate Palin for writing a couple words on her hand as a reminder prior to a speech, but there have been repeated events proving Obama cannot give a speech w/o the full text on a teleprompter or on paper in his hands (Reminder: Palins entire 2008 convention speech was off-the-cuff and w/o notes... the teleprompters failed as she walked onto the stage)
"the "we had binders full of women" boast during the second debate..."
Democrat politicians all over the country also have binders full of women, and blacks, and hispanics, etc (people they have pre-screened to some degree to have a head-start on political appointments should they win an election to an executive office... one of the biggest jokes of the 2012 campaign is that democrats twisted that comment into fake outrage and cheerfully implied the comment was somehow related to placing women in bondage
"Immigration. Romney made a tactical decision (not personal) before the 2008 election to pander to the Republican base on the issue, as a way of answering any doubts about whether he was a conservative. He stuck to that course in 2012. He lost the pretty close to the entire Hispanic vote in the general election;"
Republicans have a long tradition (all the way back to Abraham Lincoln) as a party (though admittedly not all of their candidates) that does not have different policies for different groups of people based on their skin color. Democrats, who for their entire history back to and including the KKK and slavery have always been fixated on skin color. Over the past few decades, Democrats have twisted this into all-out pandering to racial groups and they claim that Republicans who refuse to pander are racists. No matter how hard a Republican candidate tries to break-out from his party tradition by race-pandering, he can never out-pander a Democrat (Even when George W offered Amnesty, 60% of the hispanic vote went to the Democrats who offered amnesty with more hand-outs
"the fact that the housing and banking crisis and collapse of the economy occurred during Bush's watch with Bush's tax policies and Treasury/SEC administration."
Ahhh yes... The congress went to the Democrats in 2006 and they used their power to block the Bush admin attempt to stop the risky home loan activity at Govt-run FannieMae and FreddieMac. Leading Democrats like Senator Chris Dodd and Congressman Barney Frank ridiculed the idea that anything bad was happening and that there was any danger in the home loan marketplace. Then Democrat senators Joe Biden and Barack Obama both voted along with ALL democrats in the senate to stop Bush from preventing the disaster (Bush himself had no vote and, without senate approval, had no legal authority to intervene) Bush was FAR from perfect... but he was less to blame for the meltdown than the Democrat congress (and the Clintons... who during the 90's had kicked all the risky home loans into overdrive as a national policy that "everyone deserves" to own a home...)
"Obama certainly had better IT, but that was far down on the list of factors."
Actually, Obama HAD competent IT... Romney had none... a
Re:Well, yeah. (Score:5, Interesting)
During the elections I pointed out many times how my Google Plus feed was filling up with pro-Obama post on a regular basis from people I didn't know who weren't associated with people I did know. Sometimes these would only have a +5 and one or two reshares if even that. On the other hand I saw two or three Romney post come through the entire election cycle, and then only if they had something akin to a +70 and a dozen reshares or so.
To put it in perspective I thought they were both bad choices for the country, I was a Ron Paul/Gary Johnson fan and I'm a Libertarian who doesn't like either of those Bozo's. There was little doubt Google was really, really, trying hard to get me Obamafied and was almost upset it wasn't working.
Re:Compulsive gamblers (Score:4, Interesting)
None. But the amount of times we get zero I'd somehow feel like that table is rigged somehow.
And the funny bit is... (Score:2, Interesting)
Democrats are more likely (according to that study) to go with their party than Republicans... BUT... that's not even the best part...
This effect is under-reported by the paper's (false) pretense that the spying by the two administrations was the same. During the Bush years, Democrats were rabid over the typically mis-named (by politicians) "Patriot Act" which enable warrantless wiretaps and such on Americans if they were on one end of a conversation and the party on the other end was a terror suspect outside the US ..... But in the era of Obama, the federal government is spying on every single American (without a warrant, AND without probable cause in clear conflict with the plain text of the Constitution) and monitoring communications where the parties on both ends are NOT terror suspects and are INSIDE the US. In the era of Bush, companies like Google who were collecting data on everybody in exchange for use of their services (nothing in life is free) were in a separate realm from the government... but in this shiny new era of growing National Socialism, Google and the federal government are in bed together with employees regularly moving back-and-forth between them, unknown data exchanges between them, Google working to elect them (in exchange for power? money? regulatory "wiggle room"? help suppressing competitors via government oversight/regulation?) and no transparency. This government/big-business/one-party-allegience "partnership" experiment was run in the 1930's... it does not end well for the little guy (and the technology available for oppression now is far more powerful
My liberal friends who were shrieking expletives at Bush are now responding to Obama with {insert sound of crickets chirping}
TOTAL, unabashed, Hypocrisy