The regular reporting of data collection by pollsters, lobby groups, political parties, and interest groups should worry us.horrible
Post Date – 12:30 AM, Tuesday – 4/18/23
Pramod K Nayyar
The Digital Personal Data Protection Act has drawn the ire of privacy activists and legal experts. Not only does it give states unlimited powers to collect and retain data even after the data has been used, it also suggests that consent may be “deemed” in certain circumstances involving a “public interest”, but this expands the scope of the “public interest” scope interest’. Under the new draft bill, even employers could process sensitive personal information, such as religious identity or sexual orientation, without an individual’s explicit consent.
The objective lessons of how the now-notorious Cambridge Analytica uses data should not be forgotten, as states not only have totalitarian characteristics, but also data-dependent totalitarian characteristics.
AnalyticaStrategy
What Cambridge Analytica did in the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign should ring alarm bells.
It produces a national voter profile dashboard that will segment voters organized around states and forecast, calculate and plan how many thousands of voters would need to be pushed slightly to the right, or slightly further to the left, to change voting patterns. De Cruz is Trump’s only real rival based on so-called “partisan values.”
The data compiled is based on the OCEAN model: O = openness, or, how open you are to new experiences; C = conscientiousness, or whether you prefer order and planning; E = extraversion, or how social you are; A = agreeableness, or Do you put other people’s needs above your own; N = neurotic, or are you a worrier.
Analytica’s CEO, Alexander Nix, articulated very clearly in a now-famous speech “Big Data and the Power of Psychographics in the Election Process” (2016, now available on YouTube) The role of data. He calls OCEAN “the cutting edge of experimental psychology.” He simultaneously showed images of “universal female personality” and “universal African-American personality”—generalizations he found invalid. What is needed, he says, is psychoanalysis to classify individuals as “easygoing,” “conscientious” and “neurotic.”
Personality drives behavior, Nix says, and behavior determines how you vote. By having “hundreds and thousands of Americans take part in surveys,” Nix said, Analytica was able to build a model that “predicts the personality of every adult in America” (in a later presentation he claimed the company had 4,000-5,000 ” data points about every person in the United States”). He elaborates on the model with some examples.
For the neurotic, he says, there is a rational appeal: “Threats of theft and insurance policies for guns are very convincing”. Nix’s PPT in the video says: “The Second Amendment is not just a right. It’s an insurance policy. But for those who belong to closed and friendly groups and “value tradition and custom,” he shows a A photo of the older man with a boy, both armed. “It could be the grandfather who taught his son how to shoot, and the father who taught his son how to shoot,” Nix said. Talking about those values conveys more effectively your message.
So neither set of voters would, no Supports gun control – this is a key debate in US electoral politics, and as such, presidential candidates can address the issue in specific ways, defending the right to bear arms as a rational goal correct and respectively as an established tradition. With data, “we know which messages appeal to which audiences” because we’ve analyzed them, he said. He called these “persuasive messages.”
Nix concluded that one of the two remaining contenders in the presidential race is using Analytica data. Even after the Analytica case was endlessly discussed, Nix’s presentation was fascinating for what it blatantly implied.
The end of mass communication
Nix says the era of mass communication — what he calls the “blanket advertising” — is over. Communication is targeted and personalized. In the same house, husbands and wives receive different types of mailings/advertisements “probably about the same issue” because their attitudes and behaviors are documented, Nix said. For example, recording the television programs an individual watches can be used to determine what advertisements can be shown to the individual.
Geographic and demographic factors such as age, gender, race, income, religion, education, etc. are collated along with consumer and lifestyle habits (yes, your purchases on Amazon and your searches on Google!) to map psychographics or attitude data. Then there is the behavioral data collected according to the OCEAN model. Ultimately, the question to be answered by analyzing this data is: What actually persuades an individual or group—fear, authority, reciprocity, scarcity? We are looking for personalized communication that caters to our fears, anxieties, and desires, in the hope that, guided by politicians and campaign candidates, it will convince us to vote for the people we think are speaking to “our” people we care about directly.
The key to all these big data games is whether individuals are aware that personal searches, purchases, emails are being monitored. This is where privacy concerns and ethical issues of data collection start. As data subjects, we are also electoral subjects that exploit our fears for mass manipulation through targeted advertising. All political rationality is now data-driven.
data discrimination
The instrumentalization of data allows analysis of individuals and groups on a group-by-group basis. What countries, corporate groups, or any institution/individual can do with this instrumentation is anyone’s guess.
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, chair of new media studies at Simon Fraser University, in her book authentication dataafter analyzing the example and others, writes:
“In order to destroy any and all commonalities, ‘communities’ are being planned and structured in terms of disagreement and animosity…These social networks perpetuate angry micro-identities through ‘default’ variables and axioms… Schema Discrimination 2.0 – Makes old, deterministic, or classical analytical methods of controlling by direct discrimination seem innocuous.
Welcome to the flock of segregated communities, propagated by eugenic methods to cultivate a future based on a mythical past. “
Hateful messages, appeals to “tradition”—which could mean anything from particular views of our past to culinary practices to constructed “historical” confrontations—and persuasive messages don’t just address underlying anxieties.These produce This anxiety—for example, about the (mythical) population growth of certain races, or a “basic” distrust of others—reads “anti-nationalism.” The regular reporting of data collection by pollsters, lobby groups, political parties, interest groups (and not just detergent advertisers) should worry us. horrible.
Mental turns are designed to split. Divisions are often derecognised. And discriminate.
