OMR
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30:18 · 117K views · Mar 10, 2017
Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix keynotes the OMR 2017 marketing festival on big data and personality-based targeting in political campaigns. It was given before the company's scandal broke.
HN cites it, often critically, as Nix openly describing data-driven manipulation and targeting methods.
5 comments from Hacker News
But at that point couldn't you just upload an email list and target by that? I could be miles off the mark, but I assumed a lot of this came from getting people to take a "personality test" and then bucketing that person for particular ads. Admittedly I based a bunch of this on Alexander Nix's utterly fascinating OMR presentation ( this video ). As per the parent, it always amazes me at how easy it is to influence someone if you know the right levers to pull.
This is a scandal, and we should not blur lines here. Facebook engages in surveillance capitalism. Cambridge Analytica engages in Orwellian practices of deliberate and targeted mass manipulation, actively deceiving users from the outset about it's intentions, and using lies as a means to an end. From the Facebook report on the reason CA was suspended: > Like all app developers, Kogan requested and gained access to information from people after they chose to download his app. His app, “thisisyourdigitallife,” offered a personality prediction, and billed itself on Facebook as “a research app used by psychologists.” [0] Cambridge Analytica's CEO also espouses complete deceit as a strategy core strategy for using data to manipulate outcomes and advocates for using "behaviorally targeted language" to create an outcome. Like say you have a "private beach." If you really want to keep people out, why not say "sharks sighted" instead? His example, not mine: [LINK] , [LINK] , this video The scandals for me are two fold. First, we have a data repository (Facebook) that's powerful enough to assist in this type of weaponized manipulation that's entirely unprotected. Even if you think Facebook is some type of benevolent overlord that you trust with your data, it's a scandal that nothing has stopped any number of third-parties from doing what Cambridge Analytica did. Second, we have a sitting president who actively made use of these "targeted information strategies" during his election in a bl
This is completely different. Cambridge Analytica deliberately lied and deceived users about the intention of the application they created to harvest information about users: > Like all app developers, Kogan requested and gained access to information from people after they chose to download his app. His app, “thisisyourdigitallife,” offered a personality prediction, and billed itself on Facebook as “a research app used by psychologists.” [0] Cambridge Analytica is also in the business of using manipulation and psychological techniques to convince users of an outcome. And this isn't something I'm making up, the CEO of Cambridge Analytica peddles this as the potential of his platform: [LINK] The most damning aspect is his naked promotion of misinformation under the newspeak of "Behavioral Communication" where he suggests comparing the effectiveness of using "Private Beach" vs "Sharks Sighted" as a deterrent.[1] He also continued to revel in his company's ability to manipulate after the election.[2] [0]: [LINK] [1]: [LINK] [2]: this video
Palantir is just "Cambridge Analytica" redux but with more money/connections/data/breadth/depth/etc. Their ethical/moral stance i will leave it to you to infer. Watch these old presentations by CA's then ceo Alexander Nix and extrapolate to today's AI world - [LINK] and this video (note the Q/A at the end here) Also watch this interview with Christopher Wylie the CA whistleblower and again extrapolate to today's AI world - [LINK] Be afraid, Be very afraid.
The video above was 7-week before the Trump campaign and this one is after the result and a sort of review of the "success": this video