Tag: Data mining

It’s exactly the sort of conversation about politics that one would hope did not exist. Two suits, in a swanky restaurant, blithely boasting about exploiting fears buried so deep inside our subconscious that most of us don’t even know we have them; claiming that, for the right price, they can creep invisibly into your head. Cambridge Analytica boasts of dirty tricks to swing elections Read more Channel 4’s sting, which showed executives at the digital marketing firm Cambridge Analytica telling undercover reporters what on earth it is they actually do, was just the final piece of this particular jigsaw. My indefatigable Observer colleague Carole Cadwalladr put in the hard yards, over months of investigating the firm that boasts of using a combination of data and behavioural science to laser-target voters and thus help put Donald Trump in the White House. But until now it’s been difficult for many people to visualise how the unauthorised use of our personal data, or the use of social media profiles to manipulate our votes, looks in practice. It sounds bad, obviously. We clearly should care. The risks of letting tech giants plough through our holiday snaps seem abstract and remote compared with the instant gratification of social media likes and shares and gossip. The Commons select committee inquiry into fake news will recall Nix, questioning whether he “deliberately misled” them in recent testimony on the use of the Facebook data, and seek fresh evidence from Facebook. Like lobbying back in the days of cash-for-questions, data mining is a fast-growing business operating largely unseen on the fringe of politics, and while it can be used to respectable ends, it’s vulnerable to abuse.