> Mebbe we should focus our anger on this, and demand no microtargeting using socially derived data for elections
Just one out of the many links for the lazy, written just after the 2012 elections: "How Data and Micro-Targeting Won the 2012 Election for Obama - Antony Young-Mindshare North America" (https://www.mediavillage.com/article/how-data-and-micro-targ...) .
Reading it now is just, I don't know how to say it because English is not my mother tongue, but maybe ghoul-y is the word? That feeling when you watch a series-B horror movie and you can see the monster is in the house, is just in the room next to the victim, but you can't tell the victim because, well, you have no psych powers. Just copy-pasting some of the paragraphs from that article (which I had found after a quick google search) shows that we should have known about this monster since at least (now) 6 years, we should have seen that it was in the room just next to us, but we did nothing, we only made it worse:
> How did Obama win? (...) At the heart of these two strategies, was micro-targeting.
> Micro-targeting is the ability to dissect in this case, the voter population in to narrow segments and customize messaging to them, both in on-the-ground activities and in the media. (...) But it was the sophistication and the scale of how they executed this strategy that in the end, proved the knock-out punch for the Democrats.
and especially
> The Obama camp in preparing for this election, established a huge Analytics group that comprised of behavioral scientists, data technologists and mathematicians. They worked tirelessly to gather and interpret data to inform every part of the campaign. They built up a voter file that included voter history, demographic profiles, but also collected numerous other data points around interests … for example, did they give to charitable organizations or which magazines did they read to help them better understand who they were and better identify the group of 'persuadables' to target.
and
> That data was able to be drilled down to zip codes, individual households and in many cases individuals within those households.
and then it gets WTF-y (pardon my French):
> Volunteers canvassing door to door or calling constituents were able to access these profiles via an app accessed on an iPad, iPhone or Android mobile device to provide an instant transcript to help them steer their conversations. They were also able to input new data from their conversation back into the database real time.
> The profiles informed their direct and email fundraising efforts. They used issues such Obama's support for gay marriage or Romney's missteps in his portrayal of women to directly target more liberal and professional women on their database, with messages that "Obama is for women," using that opportunity to solicit contributions to his campaign