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</div><div>=</div><div>=<a href="https://theconversation.com/now-advertising-billboards-can-read-your-emotions-and-thats-just-the-start-45519" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none;">https://theconversation.com/now-advertising-billboards-can-read-your-emotions-and-thats-just-the-start-45519</a>Advertising giant <a href="http://mcsaatchi.com/" style="text-decoration-line: none; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; white-space: pre-wrap; overflow-wrap: break-word;">M&C Saatchi</a> is currently testing advertising billboards with hidden Microsoft Kinect cameras that read viewers’ emotions and react according to whether a person’s facial expression is happy, sad or neutral.The <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/media-network/2015/jul/27/artificial-intelligence-future-advertising-saatchi-clearchannel" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; white-space: pre-wrap; overflow-wrap: break-word;">test adverts</a> – which feature a fictitious coffee brand named <a href="http://bahio.coffee/" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; white-space: pre-wrap; overflow-wrap: break-word;">Bahio</a> – have already appeared on Oxford Street and Clapham Common in London. So we now have adverts that can read the reactions of those that view them and adapt accordingly, cycling through different images, designs, fonts and colours. With partners <a href="http://www.clearchannel.co.uk/" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; white-space: pre-wrap; overflow-wrap: break-word;">Clear Channel</a> and <a href="http://www.posterscope.com/" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; white-space: pre-wrap; overflow-wrap: break-word;">Posterscope</a>, Saatchi has made advertising history. When future media historians look back they will see 2015 as a landmark year.<p style="margin: 0px 0px 18px; font-size: small; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial;">There are three key things we should recognise: adverts can read our behaviour, this is based on our emotions rather than website browsing history, and that adverts use this to improve themselves.What are we to make of this? Is it a bit creepy? The answer is both yes and no. What the campaign represents is an attempt to get closer to us, something that’s a defining characteristic of the advertising and audience research industries. They want to know us more intimately so as to be able to craft messages that will affect and resonate with us. It’s an example of what I call “empathic media” because, through reading facial expressions, adverts are able to bypass the guesswork and make direct use of our emotions....=</div><div>=</div><div>DN 1/20 pt 5</div><div><div>AMY GOODMAN: I asked Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Brittany Kaiser to talk about how she became involved with Cambridge Analytica.</div><div>
</div><div>BRITTANY KAISER: I think it’s very important to note this, because there are people all around the world that are working for tech companies, that I’m sure joined that company in order to do something good. They want the world to be more connected. They want to use technology in order to communicate with everybody, to get people more engaged in important issues. And they don’t realize that while you’re moving fast and breaking things, some things get so broken that you cannot actually contemplate or predict what those repercussions are going to look like.</div><div>
</div><div>Chris Wylie and I both really idealistically joined Cambridge Analytica because we were excited about the potential of using data for exciting and good impact projects. Chris joined in 2013 on the data side in order to start developing different types of psychographic models. So he worked with Dr. Aleksandr Kogan and the Cambridge Psychometrics Centre at Cambridge University in order to start doing experiments with Facebook data, to be able to gather that data, which we now know was taken under the wrong auspices of academic research, and was then used in order to identify people’s psychographic groupings.</div><div>
</div><div>AMY GOODMAN: Now, explain that, psychographic groupings, and especially for people who are not on Facebook, who don’t understand its enormous power and the intimate knowledge it has of people. Think of someone you’re talking to who’s never experienced Facebook. Explain what is there.</div><div>
</div><div>BRITTANY KAISER: Absolutely. So, the amount of data that is collected about you on Facebook and on any of your devices is much more than you’re really made aware of. You probably haven’t ever read the terms and conditions of any of these apps on your phone. But if you actually took the time to do it and you could understand it, because most of them are written for you not to understand — it’s written in legalese — you would realize that you are giving away a lot more than you would have ever agreed to if there was transparency. This is your every move, everywhere you’re going, who you’re talking to, who your contacts are, what information you’re actually giving in other apps on your phone, your location data, all of your lifestyle, where you’re going, what you’re doing, what you’re reading, how long you spend looking at different images and websites.</div><div>
</div><div>This amount of behavioral data gives such a good picture of you that your behavior can be predicted, as Karim was talking about earlier, to a very high degree of accuracy. And this allows companies like Cambridge Analytica to understand how you see the world and what will motivate you to go and take an action — or, unfortunately, what will demotivate you. So, that amount of data, available on Facebook ever since you joined, allows a very easy platform for you to be targeted and manipulated.</div><div>
</div><div>And when I say “psychographic targeting,” I’m sure you probably are a little bit more familiar with the Myers-Briggs test, so the Myers-Briggs that asks you a set of questions in order to understand your personality and how you see the world. The system that Cambridge Analytica used is actually a lot more scientific. It’s called the OCEAN five-factor model. And OCEAN stands for O for openness, C for conscientiousness, whether you prefer plans and order or you’re a little bit more fly by the seat of your pants. Extraversion, whether you gather your energy from being out surrounded by people, or you’re introverted and you prefer to gather your energy from being alone. If you are agreeable, you care about your family, your community, society, your country, more than you care about yourself. And if you are disagreeable, then you are a little bit more egotistical. You need messages that are about benefits to you. And then the worst is neurotic. You know, it’s not bad to be neurotic. It means that you are a little bit more emotional. It means, unfortunately, as well, that you are motivated by fear-based messaging, so people can use tactics in order to scare you to doing what they want to do.</div><div>
</div><div>And this is what was targeted when they were gathering that data out of Facebook to figure out which group you belonged into. They found about 32 different groups of people, different personality types. And there were groups of psychologists that were looking into how they could understand that data and convert that into messaging that was just for you.</div><div>
</div><div>I need to remind everybody that the Trump campaign put together over a million different advertisements that were put out, a million different advertisements with tens of thousands of different campaigns. Some of these messages were for just you, were for 50 people, a hundred people. Obviously, certain groups are thousands, tens of thousands or millions. But some of them were targeted very much directly at the individual, to know exactly what you’re going to click on and exactly what you care about.</div></div><div></div><div>TargetPoint and Causeway, the two firms employed by the RNC in addition to Deep Root, apparently layered their own analytics atop the information provided by Data Trust. TargetPoint conducted thousands of surveys per week in 22 states, according to AdAge, gauging voter sentiment on a variety of topics. While Causeway helped manage the data, Deep Root used it to perfect its TV advertising targets—producing voter turnout estimates by county and using that intelligence to target its ad buys.<p style="box-sizing: inherit; text-rendering: optimizelegibility; margin: 0px auto 1.25rem; word-break: break-word; padding: 0px; line-height: 32px; max-width: 636px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">A source with years of experience working on political campaign data operations told Gizmodo that the data exposed by Deep Root appeared to be customized for the RNC and had apparently been used to create models for turnout and voter preferences. Metadata in the files suggested that the database wasn’t Deep Root’s working copy, but rather a post-election version of its data, the source said, adding that it was somewhat surprising the files hadn’t been discarded.<p style="box-sizing: inherit; text-rendering: optimizelegibility; margin: 0px auto 1.25rem; word-break: break-word; padding: 0px; line-height: 32px; max-width: 636px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Because the data from the 2008 and 2012 elections is outdated—the source compared it to the kind of address and phone data one could find on a “lousy internet lookup site”—it’s not very valuable. Even the 2016 data is quickly becoming stale. “This is a proprietary dataset based on a mix of public records, data from commercial providers, and a variety of predictive models of uncertain provenance and quality,” the source said, adding: “Undoubtedly it took millions of dollars to produce.”<p style="box-sizing: inherit; text-rendering: optimizelegibility; margin: 0px auto 1.25rem; word-break: break-word; padding: 0px; line-height: 32px; max-width: 636px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Although basic voter information is public record, Deep Root’s dataset contains a swirl of proprietary information from the RNC’s data firms. Many of the filenames indicate that they potentially contain market research on Democratic candidates and the independent expenditure committees that support them. (Up to two terabytes of data contained on the server was protected by permission settings.)One exposed folder is labeled “Exxon-Mobile” [sic] and contains spreadsheets apparently used to predict which voters support the oil and gas industry. Divided by state, the files include the voters’ names and addresses, along with a unique RNC identification number assigned to every US citizen registered to vote. Each row indicates where voters likely fall on issues of interest to ExxonMobil, the country’s biggest natural gas producer.The data evaluates, for example, whether or not a specific voter believes drilling for fossil fuels is vital to US security. It also predicts if the voter thinks the US should be moving away from fossil-fuel use. The ExxonMobil “national score” document alone contains data on 182,746,897 Americans spread across 19 fields.]</div><div>=refhttps://yyy.theguardian.com/world/2012/feb/17/obama-digital-data-machine-facebook-electionguk no lnxObama, Facebook and the power of friendship: the 2012 data electionA unified computer database that gathers and refines information on millions of potential voters is at the forefront of campaign technology – and could be the key to an Obama winEd Pilkington and Amanda Michel in New York
Fri 17 Feb 2012 
 President Obama is also well on the way towards staging the world's first billion-dollar campaign. Photograph: Susan Walsh/APBarack Obama's re-election team are building a vast digital data operation that for the first time combines a unified database on millions of Americans with the power of Facebook to target individual voters to a degree never achieved before.
Digital analysts predict this will be the first election cycle in which Facebook could become a dominant political force. The social media giant has grown exponentially since the last presidential election, rendering it for the first time a major campaigning tool that has the potential to transform friendship into a political weapon.
Facebook is also being seen as a source of invaluable data on voters. The re-election team, Obama for America, will be inviting its supporters to log on to the campaign website via Facebook, thus allowing the campaign to access their personal data and add it to the central data store – the largest, most detailed and potentially most powerful in the history of political campaigns. If 2008 was all about social media, 2012 is destined to become the "data election".
"Facebook is now ubiquitous," says Dan Siroker, a former Google digital analyst who joined Obama's campaign in 2008 and now runs his own San Francisco-based analytics consultancy, Optimizely. "Whichever candidate uses Facebook the most effectively could win the war."
For the past nine months a crack team of some of America's top data wonks has occupied an entire floor of the Prudential building in Chicago devising a digital campaign from the bottom up. The team draws much of its style and inspiration from the corporate sector, with its driving ambition to create a vote-garnering machine that is smooth, unobtrusive and ruthlessly efficient.
Already more than 100 geeks, some recruited at top-flight university job fairs including Stanford, are assembled in the Prudential drawn from an array of disciplines: statisticians, predictive modellers, data mining experts, mathematicians, software engineers, bloggers, internet advertising experts and online organisers.
At the core is a single beating heart – a unified computer database that gathers and refines information on millions of committed and potential Obama voters. The database will allow staff and volunteers at all levels of the campaign – from the top strategists answering directly to Obama's campaign manager Jim Messina to the lowliest canvasser on the doorsteps of Ohio – to unlock knowledge about individual voters and use it to target personalised messages that they hope will mobilise voters where it counts most.
Every time an individual volunteers to help out – for instance by offering to host a fundraising party for the president – he or she will be asked to log onto the re-election website with their Facebook credentials. That in turn will engage Facebook Connect, the digital interface that shares a user's personal information with a third party.
Consciously or otherwise, the individual volunteer will be injecting all the information they store publicly on their Facebook page – home location, date of birth, interests and, crucially, network of friends – directly into the central Obama database.
"If you log in with Facebook, now the campaign has connected you with all your relationships," a digital campaign organiser who has worked on behalf of Obama says.
The potential benefits of the strategy can already be felt. The Obama campaign this year has attracted about 1.3 million donors, 98% of whom have contributed $250 or less – that's more than double the number at the same stage in 2008. At this rate, Obama is also well on the way towards staging the world's first billion-dollar campaign.
Under its motto "Bigger, better, 2012", the Chicago team intends between now and election day in November to create a campaign powerhouse which will allow fundraisers, advertisers and state and local organisers to draw from the same data source.
Joe Rospars, the campaign's chief digital strategist, told a seminar at the Guardian-sponsored Social Media Week that the aim was to create technology that encourages voters to get involved, in tune with Obama's emphasis on community organising.
Campaign insiders say that the emphasis this year will be on efficiency more than any headline-grabbing technical wizardry. But that should not obscure how significant this year's presidential cycle will be in putting to the test the first custom-made digital campaign.
Mark Sullivan, founder of Voter Activation Network, which manages the Democratic party's central database of voter information known as Vote Builder, says that "what we will see in 2012 will make 2008 look really primitive".
Judith Freeman of New Organizing Institute, who worked on both John Kerry's 2004 and Obama's 2008 presidential campaigns, says there is a leap forward in technology every presidential cycle, and 2012 would be no exception. "There's a deadline – it's got to be done by election day – and that provides a huge push to make things happen."
In 2008 the Obama digital team was lauded around the world for its groundbreaking work on internet fundraising. Yet in fact, the separation of its data on voters into several distinct silos forced high-level staffers to spend hours manually downloading information from one database to another.
The Obama team in 2008 did a good job in beginning to tear down those walls, releasing extraordinary fundraising energy in the process that raised about $500m online.
This year the Chicago team hasn't knocked down the walls so much as dispensed with them altogether. They have built from the ground up a unified database that incorporates and connects everything the campaign knows about a voter within it.
Rospars said that in 2012 they no longer had to try to integrate data in the campaign. "We are just one campaign now – we built it from scratch."
The centralised nature of the database may raise privacy issues as the election cycle progresses. Jeff Chester of the digital advertising watchdog Center for Digital Democracy, which has been calling for regulators to review the growth of digital marketing in politics, said that "this is beyond J Edgar Hoover's dream. In its rush to exploit the power of digital data to win re-election, the Obama campaign appears to be ignoring the ethical and moral implications."
But from the vantage point of the campaign the benefits are evident.
"Fusing your data into one central store is cheaper, quicker and allows you to be more targeted," said Jim Pugh, who was part of Obama's 2008 digital team and now works for the progressive online movement, Rebuild the Dream.
The Obama database incorporates Vote Builder, a store of essential information such as age, postal address, occupation and voting history drawn from the voter files of 190 million active voters. It lines up and matches those voter files with data gathered from online interactions with the president's supporters – notably the millions of pieces of information its army of canvassers collected across the nation during the 2008 race, a list of email addresses of supporters that it has amassed and that now stands at about 23 million, as well as the contact information of Obama's 25 million Facebook fans.
Facebook itself has been transformed as a political campaign tool since 2008, simply by dint of its exponential growth. Four years ago there were about 40 million Facebook users in the US; now there are more than 160 million – incorporating almost the entire voting public.
The significance of the fusion of Facebook and voter file data is hard to overemphasise. "This is the Moneyball moment for politics," says Sam Graham-Felsen, Obama's chief blogger in 2008. "If you can figure out how to leverage the power of friendship, that opens up incredible possibilities."
First among those possibilities is that the campaign can distribute customised content designed specifically for its Facebook fans to share with their much wider circle of friends. The messages can be honed to a particular demographic – age, gender, etc – as well as set of interests, and targeted on the most hotly contested parts of the most crucial battleground states.
"Influencers" – those people who tend to act as thought leaders among their friends on Facebook – can be identified and prioritised.
Teddy Goff, the digital director of the re-election team, told Social Media Week that as the year progresses there would be more and more "persuasion through interaction".
Individual voters would be given access to digital platforms from which they will be able to tell their own stories "and that's far more powerful than anything we can say", Goff said. "That will be the story of this election. People's own stories really moves votes."
Goff said the campaign was focused on building relationships through social media. An Obama message would be crafted so that "not only can it be passed to your friends but to those friends that we think are most in need of passing it on to".
The bottom line is that if you are sent a message from your Facebook friend encouraging you to turn up to an event or donate to Obama, you are vastly more likely to respond than if the request comes from an anonymous campaign staffer.
The other door that data integration will further open in 2012 is personalised marketing. This has been the Holy Grail of political campaigners for decades: the idea that you can talk directly to voters and serve them customised messages.
In the old world of snail mail, that could be achieved to some degree through direct marketing – ie leaflets dropped into the letter box – but that is expensive and far too slow with today's 24-hour news cycle.
The fusion of information into a centralised database allows you to direct market online at much less cost and virtually instantaneously.
The technique has begun to spread widely among commercial businesses over the past year, and it is only a matter of time before such hyper-targeting is standard across political campaigns. Indeed, we've already started to see it this year.
The Obama campaign has already tailored a single donation request to 26 distinct segments of the voting public. The Republicans are also getting in on the act.
Michele Bachmann used customised online advertising in Iowa to reach Republican voters only, sending to their computers messages with a local spin for each of the state's 99 counties. That helped her win Iowa's vaunted straw poll in August 2011 (though that didn't help her in the long run). Rick Perry sent God-praising commercials to Iowans who listed themselves as evangelicals on Facebook.
The company CampaignGrid, that serves mainly Republican candidates, claims to be able to online market direct to targeted households. It has an integrated database on 110 million voters across America – some 65% of the electorate – to whom it can serve personalised ads, following them wherever they are browsing on the internet.
Jeff Dittus, the company's co-founder, illustrates what this means. He worked on behalf of one unidentified Republican presidential candidate, serving online ads in the Miami-Dade region of Florida specifically to 400,000 individuals who had voted in at least two of the four previous Republican primaries. The adverts were further customised for gender, and for Spanish speaking.
They were distributed to the individuals through internet ad exchanges that allow for instantaneous filtering of users the nanosecond they click onto a video on any one of four million websites. In that flash, if you fitted the criterion you were served with a 30-second pre-roll video from the candidate delivering a message to you that you would have found remarkably personal.
"I'm sure this is the future of digital political campaigning," said CampaignGrid's CEO Jeff Dittus.
Drew Brighton, CEO of TargetSmart Communications, is hoping to do the same hyper-targeting for Democratic and progressive politicians and causes through his new product Target Blue. It matches up the details of up to 50m cookies embedded on individual computers with voter files and uses it to identify Democratic-leaning individuals to whom it can serve customised ads wherever they go on the web.
The company is also developing a system for targeting Democratic voters through their computer IP addresses down to such tightly drawn areas or "IP zones" as just 20 households. That allows for micro-targeting depending on the average income bracket, age profile and concerns of that tiny locality.
The elephant in the room, of course, is television, which continues to dominate advertising spending by political campaigns. Most analysts agree that 2012 has come too soon for any equally transformative leaps forward in targeted or "addressable" TV advertising.
Cable television can close in on geographic zones ranging from a few thousand to up to 100,000 viewers allowing campaigns to shape their messages to those clusters. The tighter the geographical area that can be drawn, the more efficient the TV advertising becomes as campaign managers can focus on primarily-Democratic, Republican or independent neighbourhoods.
But its still a relatively blunt instrument. The prize would be to be able to fuse cable subscriptions with voter files so that TV adverts could be sent to households of a specific political persuasion.
Technically, that's already possible. Comcast Spotlight, the advertising arm of Comcast Cable, has run trials of commercial as opposed to political addressable advertising in Baltimore. Adverts custom-made to speak to various demographic groups were piped into 60,000 identified households, though the personal details were removed to protect privacy. The results confirmed the power of the technology: homes receiving addressable adverts tuned away a third less of the time than homes receiving untargeted commercials.
Dan Sinagoga, who specialises in political advertising at Comcast Spotlight, says that all advertisers, but political ones in particular, "would like to be doing addressable advertising yesterday". But he said it was unlikely to happen in any great quantity in 2012 as there are too many hurdles, including concerns in Washington about the privacy of cable TV consumers.
No such impediment will hold back the digital explosion this year. As an Obama insider puts it: "Give us less wood, and we'll make more fire."919<a href="https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/republicans-hate-the-rncs-new-mandatory-shady-fundraising-tool-heres-who-profits-off-it/">https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/republicans-hate-the-rncs-new-mandatory-shady-fundraising-tool-heres-who-profits-off-it/</a>no lnx
Republicans hate the RNC’s new mandatory, shady fundraising tool. Here’s who profits off itWritten by Daily Kos Staff / Daily Kos September 15, 2019Thursday kicked off the House Republicans’ annual retreat, and featured a compulsory presentation on the GOP’s answer to ActBlue, the grassroots, small-donor platform that Democrats have been using for well over a decade. It did not go well at all, according to POLITICO. House Republicans openly argued with Trump/RNC political operatives over the Jared Kushner-pushed initiative.
The new tool is called WinRed, and it was initially released in June. To say that it is problem-plagued would be an understatement.  Suffice it to say that it is the antithesis of ActBlue—in more ways than one. Despite the obvious, that it’s a tool designed to help conservative candidates, the GOP’s new tool is: convoluted to use,for-profit (whereas ActBlue is nonprofit),secretive about plans for donors’ data,being forced upon candidates to use through “veiled threats”,and can take quite a large percentage of whatever donation is given.According to the Daily Kos’ own David Nir:
For starters, there’s the grifty fee structure: While ActBlue charges a flat 3.95% per contribution, WinRed takes a 3.8% cut plus 30 cents per transaction. That might not sound like a big difference, but it’s huge. On a $5 contribution, ActBlue will net 20 cents. WinRed, however, will take 49 cents, which in percentage terms is a giant 9.8%.
What’s more, on a contribution page that lists multiple campaigns, it sounds like WinRed will get 30 cents per donation. (From the site itself: “There is a 3.8% + 30 cents per transaction fee with each donation made.”) In other words, if you split $25 across five candidates, that’s a cool $2.45 for WinRed. ActBlue would take less than a buck.
But that’s not all.
WinRed has quite a few privacy and security concerns as well. Members of Congress ”can’t get straight answers about what’s going to happen with their data.” That’s not something donors want to hear. However, GOP lawmakers at the retreat seemed less concerned about their donors’ information ending up in criminal hands as they were worried that their primary opponent might scoop that info, since all the data goes to the RNC’s clearinghouse firm, Data Trust.
By the way, if you thought you heard of Data Trust before, it’s because their records were involved in that massive data leak in 2017, where the personal information of millions of people—including birthdates, cell numbers, and addresses—was exposed when it was accidentally put on a publicly accessible Amazon server.
Bottom line: WinRed sucks. The candidates don’t trust it. The donors don’t like using it. The only reason it’s being used is because everyone is being coerced, which is slightly ironic given how much lip service the GOP gives to their supposed belief in the free market.
Several GOP candidates have complained that that there was a competitor that actually did work, wasn’t secretive, and had lower fees. Give.GOP was gaining traction with a lot of candidates, but it’s parent company was recently given a cease and desist letter by the RNC, which forbade them from using any kind of GOP branding.
So the big question….. why would the RNC pick sides in a fight between for-profit competitors?
Since the RNC and the Trump 2020 campaign officially merged last year, Donald Trump has been calling the shots, and he made it clear that he wants everyone using WinRed. The platform is being forced upon the National Republican Senate Committee and the National Republican Congressional Committee as well. Trump actually shilled for WinRed when it went live.Donald J. Trump?@realDonaldTrumpI am pleased to announce the launch of http://tmagac.winred.com . This new platform will allow my campaign and other Republicans to compete with the Democrats money machine. This has been a priority of mine and I’m pleased to share that it is up and running! #KeepAmericaGreatTrump Make America Great Again CommitteeSTAND WITH PRESIDENT TRUMP!
secure.winred.com
So, the short answer is that Trump wants it., and what Trump wants, Trump gets in his new GOP.But why does Trump want to force everyone to use such a crappy fundraising tool that no one likes?
Well …What Trump’s announcement did not mention was that the decision to use “WinRed” will potentially funnel millions of extra dollars to a firm owned by Gerrit Lansing, a former RNC staffer who left his White House job only three weeks into the administration after reportedly failing his FBI background screening.What’s more, about two-thirds of the total processing fee is used to pay Stripe, the credit-card processing company that saw a $30 million investment from Joshua Kushner’s Thrive Capital in 2014.Joshua Kushner is presidential son-in-law and White House aide Jared Kushner’s younger brother.
Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.
See, that’s how it always works in Trumpland.
The victor is always the Trump family and their immediate friends.
—Rick Wilson, Republican political consultant
Duh.
Since 2004, ActBlue has brought in 3.5 billion dollars for progressive candidates. Just imagine the money to be made by Kushner the younger if WinRed manages to gain a foothold and get even a small percentage of that kind of success.
Everyday I learn about a new grift from this president. At least this one only hurts his supporters, for whom I have zero sympathy.
ref<a href="https://gizmodo.com/gop-data-firm-accidentally-leaks-personal-details-of-ne-1796211612">https://gizmodo.com/gop-data-firm-accidentally-leaks-personal-details-of-ne-1796211612</a>no lnx many docs
James Whitbrook2 hours ago
GOP Data Firm Accidentally Leaks Personal Details of Nearly 200 Million American Voters6/19/17 8:00AMFiled to:RNC DATA LEAKPolitical data gathered on more than 198 million US citizens was exposed this month after a marketing firm contracted by the Republican National Committee stored internal documents on a publicly accessible Amazon server.The data leak contains a wealth of personal information on roughly 61 percent of the US population. Along with home addresses, birthdates, and phone numbers, the records include advanced sentiment analyses used by political groups to predict where individual voters fall on hot-button issues such as gun ownership, stem cell research, and the right to abortion, as well as suspected religious affiliation and ethnicity. The data was amassed from a variety of sources—from the banned subredditr/fatpeoplehate to American Crossroads, the super PAC co-founded by former White House strategist Karl Rove.
Deep Root Analytics, a conservative data firm that identifies audiences for political ads, confirmed ownership of the data to Gizmodo on Friday.
UpGuard cyber risk analyst Chris Vickery discovered Deep Root’s data online last week. More than a terabyte was stored on the cloud server without the protection of a password and could be accessed by anyone who found the URL. Many of the files did not originate at Deep Root, but are instead the aggregate of outside data firms and Republican super PACs, shedding light onto the increasingly advanced data ecosystem that helped propel President Donald Trump’s slim margins in key swing states.
Although files possessed by Deep Root would be typical in any campaign, Republican or Democratic, experts say its exposure in a single open database raises significant privacy concerns. “This is valuable for people who have nefarious purposes,” Joseph Lorenzo Hall, the chief technologist at the Center for Democracy and Technology, said of the data.
“This is valuable for people who have nefarious purposes.”The RNC paid Deep Root $983,000 last year, according to Federal Election Commission reports, but its server contained records from a variety of other conservative sources paid millions more, including The Data Trust (also known as GOP Data Trust), the Republican party’s primary voter file provider. Data Trust received over $6.7 million from the RNC during the 2016 cycle, according to OpenSecrets.org, and its president, Johnny DeStefano, now serves as Trump’s director of presidential personnel.
The Koch brothers’ political group Americans for Prosperity, which had a data-swapping agreement with Data Trust during the 2016 election cycle, contributed heavily to the exposed files, as did the market research firm TargetPoint, whose co-founder previously served as director of Mitt Romney’s strategy team. (The Koch brothers also subsidized a data company known as i360, which began exchanging voter files with Data Trust in 2014.) Furthermore, the files provided by Rove’s American Crossroads contain strategic voter data used to target, among others, disaffected Democrats and undecideds in Nevada, New Hampshire, Ohio, and other key battleground states.
Deep Root further obtained hundreds of files (at least) from The Kantar Group, a leading media and market research company with offices in New York, Beijing,Moscow, and more than a hundred other cities on six continents. Each file offers rich details about political ads—estimated cost, audience demographics, reach, and more—by and about figures and groups spanning the political spectrum. There are files on the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, Planned Parenthood, and the American Civil Liberties Union, as well as files on every 2016 presidential candidate, Republicans included.
What’s more, the Kantar files each contain video links to related political ads stored on Kantar’s servers.
Kantar files on political ads involving US officials, candidates, and political organizations. (UpGuard)Kantar files on political ads involving US officials, candidates, and political organizations. (UpGuard)Spreadsheets acquired from TargetPoint, which partnered with Deep Root and GOP Data Trust during the 2016 election, include the home addresses, birthdates, and party affiliations of nearly 200 million registered voters in the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections, as well as some 2016 voters. TargetPoint’s data seeks to resolve questions about where individual voters stand on dozens of political issues. For example: Is the voter eco-friendly? Do they favor lowering taxes? Do they believe the Democrats should stand up to Trump? Do they agree with Trump’s “America First” economic stance? Pharmaceutical companies do great damage: Agree or Disagree?
The details of voters’ likely preferences for issues like stem cell research and gun control were likely drawn from a variety of sources according to a Democratic strategist who spoke with Gizmodo.
“Data like that would be a combination of polling data, real world data from door-knocking and phone-calling and other canvassing activities, coupled with modeling using the data we already have to extrapolate what the voters we don’t know about would think,” the strategist said. “The campaigns that do it right combine all the available data together to make the most robust model for every single voter in the target universe.”
“We take full responsibility for this situation.”In a statement, Deep Root founder Alex Lundry told Gizmodo, “We take full responsibility for this situation.” He said the data included proprietary information as well as publicly available voter data provided by state government officials. “Since this event has come to our attention, we have updated the access settings and put protocols in place to prevent further access,” Lundry said.
Deep Root’s data was exposed after the company updated its security settings on June 1, Lundry said. Deep Root has retained Stroz Friedberg, a cybersecurity and digital forensics firm, to investigate. “Based on the information we have gathered thus far, we do not believe that our systems have been hacked,” Lundry added.
So far, Deep Root doesn’t believe its proprietary data was accessed by any malicious third parties during the 12 days that the data was exposed on the open web.
Deep Root’s server was discovered by UpGuard’s Vickery on the night of June 12 as he was searching for data publicly accessible on Amazon’s cloud service. He used the same process last month to detect sensitive files tied to a US Defense Department project and exposed by an employee of a top defense contractor.
This is not the first leak of voter files uncovered by Vickery, who told Gizmodo that he was alarmed over how the data was apparently being used—some states, for instance, prohibit the commercial use of voter records. Moreover, it was not immediately clear to whom the data belonged. “It was decided that law enforcement should be contacted before attempting any contact with the entity responsible,” said Vickery, who reported that the server was secured two days later on June 14.
A web of data firms funnel research into campaignsDeep Root’s data sheds light onto the increasingly sophisticated data operation that has fed recent Republican campaigns and lays bare the intricate network of political organizations, PACs, and analysis firms that trade in bulk voter data. In an email to Gizmodo, Deep Root said that its voter models are used to enhance the understanding of TV viewership for political ad buyers. “The data accessed was not built for or used by any specific client,” Lundry said. “It is our proprietary analysis to help inform local television ad buying.”
However, the presence of data on the server from several political organizations, including TargetPoint and Data Trust, suggests that it was used for Republican political campaigns. Deep Root also works primarily with GOP customers (although similar vendors, such as NationBuilder, service the Democrats as well).
Deep Root is one of three data firms hired by the Republican National Committee in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election. Founded by Lundry, a data scientist on the Jeb Bush and Mitt Romney campaigns, the firm was one of three analytics teams that worked on the Trump campaign following the party’s national convention in the summer of 2016.
Lundry’s work brought him into Trump’s campaign war room, according to a post-election AdAge article that charted the GOP’s 2016 data efforts. Deep Root was hand-picked by the RNC’s then-chief of staff, Katie Walsh, in September of last year and joined two other data shops—TargetPoint Consulting and Causeway Solutions—in the effort to win Trump the presidency.
Walsh, who now works for the nonprofit America First Policies after a brief stint in the White House, oversaw Trump’s data operation in partnership with Brad Parscale, Trump’s digital director. (Parscale did not respond to a request for comment before press time. Attempts to reach Walsh for comment were also unsuccessful.) Walsh and Parscale focused their efforts on three categories of voters, AdAge reports: voters who might be predisposed to support Trump, Republican voters who were uncertain about Trump, and voters that were leaning toward Hillary Clinton but could be persuaded by Trump’s message of changing up government-as-usual.
A spreadsheet forecasting specific voters’ likely opinions on various issues weighed using a 0-to-1 scale. (UpGuard)A spreadsheet forecasting specific voters’ likely opinions on various issues weighed using a 0-to-1 scale. (UpGuard)To appeal to the three crucial categories, it appears that Trump’s team relied on voter data provided by Data Trust. Complete voter rolls for 2008 and 2012, as well as partial 2016 voter rolls for Florida and Ohio, apparently compiled by Data Trust are contained in the dataset exposed by Deep Root.
Data Trust acquires voter rolls from state officials and then standardizes the voter data to create a clean, manageable record of all registered US voters, a source familiar with the firm’s operations told Gizmodo. Voter data itself is public record and therefore not particularly sensitive, the source added, but the tools Data Trust uses to standardize that data are considered proprietary. That data is then provided to political clients, including analytics firms like Deep Root. While Data Trust requires its clients to protect the data, it has to take clients at their word that industry-standard encryption and security protocols are in place.
TargetPoint and Causeway, the two firms employed by the RNC in addition to Deep Root, apparently layered their own analytics atop the information provided by Data Trust. TargetPoint conducted thousands of surveys per week in 22 states, according to AdAge, gauging voter sentiment on a variety of topics. While Causeway helped manage the data, Deep Root used it to perfect its TV advertising targets—producing voter turnout estimates by county and using that intelligence to target its ad buys.
A source with years of experience working on political campaign data operations told Gizmodo that the data exposed by Deep Root appeared to be customized for the RNC and had apparently been used to create models for turnout and voter preferences. Metadata in the files suggested that the database wasn’t Deep Root’s working copy, but rather a post-election version of its data, the source said, adding that it was somewhat surprising the files hadn’t been discarded.
Because the data from the 2008 and 2012 elections is outdated—the source compared it to the kind of address and phone data one could find on a “lousy internet lookup site”—it’s not very valuable. Even the 2016 data is quickly becoming stale. “This is a proprietary dataset based on a mix of public records, data from commercial providers, and a variety of predictive models of uncertain provenance and quality,” the source said, adding: “Undoubtedly it took millions of dollars to produce.”
Although basic voter information is public record, Deep Root’s dataset contains a swirl of proprietary information from the RNC’s data firms. Many of the filenames indicate that they potentially contain market research on Democratic candidates and the independent expenditure committees that support them. (Up to two terabytes of data contained on the server was protected by permission settings.)
One exposed folder is labeled “Exxon-Mobile” [sic] and contains spreadsheets apparently used to predict which voters support the oil and gas industry. Divided by state, the files include the voters’ names and addresses, along with a unique RNC identification number assigned to every US citizen registered to vote. Each row indicates where voters likely fall on issues of interest to ExxonMobil, the country’s biggest natural gas producer.
The data evaluates, for example, whether or not a specific voter believes drilling for fossil fuels is vital to US security. It also predicts if the voter thinks the US should be moving away from fossil-fuel use. The ExxonMobil “national score” document alone contains data on 182,746,897 Americans spread across 19 fields.
The “Exxon-Mobile” file contains unique RNC codes and sentiment analyses for more than 182 million US voters. (UpGuard)The “Exxon-Mobile” file contains unique RNC codes and sentiment analyses for more than 182 million US voters. (UpGuard)Reddit analysisSome of the data included in Deep Root’s dataset veers into downright bizarre territory. A folder titled simply ‘reddit’ houses 170 GBs of data apparently scraped from several subreddits, including the controversial r/fatpeoplehate that was home to a community of people who posted pictures of people and mocked them for their weight before it was banned from Reddit’s platform in 2015. Other subreddits that appear to have been scraped by Deep Root or a partner organization focused on more benign topics, like mountain biking and the Spanish language.
The Reddit data could’ve been used as training data for an artificial intelligence algorithm focused on natural language processing, or it might have been harvested as part of an effort to match up Reddit users with their voter registration records. During the 2012 election cycle, Barack Obama’s campaign data team relied on information gleaned from Facebook profiles and matched profiles to voter records.
During the 2016 election season, Reddit played host to a legion of Trump supporters who gathered in subreddits like r/The_Donald to comb through leaked Democratic National Committee emails and craft pro-Trump memes. Trump himself participated in an “Ask Me Anything” session on r/The_Donald during his campaign.
Given how active some Trump supporters are on Reddit—r/The_Donald currently boasts more than 430,000 members—it makes sense that Trump’s data team might be interested in analyzing data from the site.
A FiveThirtyEight analysis that looked at where r/The_Donald members spend their time when they’re not talking politics might shed some light onto why Deep Root collected r/fatpeoplehate data. FiveThirtyEight found that, when Redditors weren’t commenting in political subreddits, they most often frequented r/fatpeoplehate.
Recent Videos from GizmodoVIEW MORE >Watch a Giant Army of Lego Droids Play the Star Wars Theme on Real Instruments9/02/19 8:00AMIt’s possible that Deep Root intended to use data from r/fatpeoplehate to build a more comprehensive profile of Trump voters. (Lundry declined to comment beyond his initial statement on any of information included in the Deep Root dataset.)
A raw excerpt of the scraped Reddit data stored on Deep Root’s server. (UpGuard)A raw excerpt of the scraped Reddit data stored on Deep Root’s server. (UpGuard)However, FiveThirtyEight’s investigation doesn’t account for Deep Root’s collection of data from mountain-biking and Spanish-speaking subreddits that weren’t as popular with r/The_Donald members—and data from these subreddits that are not so closely linked to Trump’s diehard supporters might be more useful for his campaign’s goal of pursuing swing voters.
“My guess is that they were scraping Reddit posts to match to the voter file as another input for individual modeling,” a source familiar with campaign data operations told Gizmodo. “Given the number of random forums, my guess is they started with a list of accounts to scrape from, rather than scraping from all forums then trying to match from there (in which case you’d start with the political ones).”
Matching voter records with Reddit usernames would be complicated and any large-scale effort would likely result in many inaccuracies, the source said. However, campaigns have attempted to match voter files with social media profiles in the past. Such an effort by Deep Root wouldn’t be entirely surprising, and would likely yield rich data on the small portion of users it was able to match with their voter profiles, the source explained.
Data exposes sensitive voter infoThe Deep Root incident represents the largest known leak of Americans’ voter records, outstripping past exposures by several million records. Five voter-file leaks over the past 18 months exposed between 350,000 and 191 million files, some of which paired voter data—name, race, gender, birthdate, address, phone number, party affiliation, etc.—with email accounts, social media profiles, and records of gun ownership.
“I can think of no avenues for punishing political data breaches or otherwise properly aligning the incentives.”Campaigns and the data analysis firms they employ are a particularly weak point for data exposure, security experts say. Corporations that don’t properly secure customer data can face significant financial repercussions—just ask Target or Yahoo. But because campaigns are short-term operations, there’s not much incentive for them to take data security seriously, and valuable data is often left out to rust after an election.
“Campaigns are very narrowly focused. They are shoestring operations, even presidential campaigns. So they don’t think of this as an asset they need to protect,” the Center for Democracy and Technology’s Hall told Gizmodo.
Even though voter rolls are public record and are easy to access—Ohio, for instance, makes its voter rolls available to download online—their exposure can still be harmful.
Voter registration records include ZIP codes, birthdates, and other personal information that have been crucial in research efforts to re-identify anonymous medical data. Latanya Sweeney, a professor of government and technology at Harvard University, famously used voter data to re-identify Massachusetts Governor William Weld from information in anonymous hospital discharge records.
Because of the personal information they contain, voter registration databases can also be useful in identity theft schemes.
Even though exposure of Deep Root’s data has the potential to harm voters, it’s exactly the kind of data that campaigns lust after and will spend millions of dollars to obtain. Campaigns are motivated to accumulate as much deeply personal information about voters as possible, so they can spend their ad dollars in the right swing districts where they’re likely to sway the greatest number of voters. But voter data rapidly goes stale and campaigns close up shop quickly, so data is seen as disposable and often isn’t well-protected.
“I can think of no avenues for punishing political data breaches or otherwise properly aligning the incentives. I worry that if there’s no way to punish campaigns for leaking this stuff, it’s going to continue to happen until something bad happens,” Hall said. The data left behind by campaigns can pose a lingering security issue, he added. “None of these motherfuckers were ever Boy Scouts or Girl Scouts, they don’t pack out what they pack in.”
[UpGuard]
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