Weekly New/Digital Media (52)
Watchdog to launch inquiry into misuse of data in politics
Summary:
"Investigation follows revelations of digital firm’s involvement in Brexit" "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." Exploring how the intervention of a US company on the Brexit vote due to the growing concerns of professionals over the rapid development of technology.
"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" An exchange of data that isn't legal in European countries unlike the US due to the data protection act. This all highlighting the success of the brexit campaign doing to sufficient data mining and targeted advertising.
Key facts/statistics:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Mercer is a friend of former Ukip leader Nigel Farage
- “They were happy to help,” he said. “Because Nigel is a good friend of the Mercers. And Mercer introduced them to us. He said, ‘Here’s this company we think may be useful to you’. What they were trying to do in the US and what we were trying to do had massive parallels. We shared a lot of information.”
- In February 2016, the company’s chief executive, Alexander Nix, talked about how it had helped to “supercharge Leave.EU’s social media campaign by ensuring the right messages are getting to the right voters online”.
- But Green MP Caroline Lucas, who campaigned for Remain, said: “Clearly, there are questions to be answered about the Leave campaign’s use of big data and a potentially huge ‘in kind’ donation by Cambridge Analytica. To have a foreign billionaire’s fingerprints left all over such a seismic moment in British history is deeply concerning and requires urgent further investigation as to whether electoral law was broken.”
- Cambridge Analytica’s analysts, until recently available on YouTube, explained how it had used “Facebook likes … as an input to machine-learning models.”
- In the US, companies are free to use third-party data without seeking consent. But Gavin Millar QC, of Matrix Chambers, said this was not the case in Europe.
- "That’s the same principle behind the data protection act"
- A Facebook spokesperson said: “Our investigation to date has not uncovered anything that suggests wrongdoing with respect to Cambridge Analytica’s work on the Leave and Trump campaigns.”
- Canadian firm AggregateIQ uses targeted marketing such as online advertising and social media to ensure that its clients’ content reaches the right people.
- Dominic Cummings, the campaign director of Vote Leave, declared: “Without a doubt, the Vote Leave campaign owes a great deal of its success to the work of AggregateIQ. We couldn’t have done it without them.”
- “A rapid convergence in the data mining, algorithmic and granular analytics capabilities of companies like Cambridge Analytica and Facebook is creating powerful, unregulated and opaque ‘intelligence platforms’. In turn, these can have enormous influence to affect what we learn, how we feel, and how we vote. The algorithms they may produce are frequently hidden from scrutiny and we see only the results of any insights they might choose to publish.”
My opinion:
The highlights how much power social media and NDM is having on such a vast audience and politics, as data mining is becoming more and more easier despite all these rules and regulations. This data mining allows for campaigns to take place aiding NDM to influence vast audiences in a much easier manner than would have been previously possible leading to audience being even more easily influenced than before. Almost suggesting that as audiences become more and more active in their media consumption they tend to become more passive and powerless against media influence.
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