AG Healey announces investigation into data firm used by Trump campaign - Polidicks

AG Healey announces investigation into data firm used by Trump campaign Responding to reports that a data firm employed by the Trump presidential campaign improperly harvested information on 50 million Facebook users, Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey on Saturday launched a state investigation into the matter. Citing a New York Times investigation into Cambridge Analytica — a British data-analysis outfit funded by New York billionaire Robert Mercer, a major underwriter of right-wing candidates and campaigns — Healey retweeted the story and announced the investigation Saturday afternoon. https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2018/03/17/maura-healey-announces-investigation-into-data-firm-used-trump-campaign/Njq4PGzF1IQC3ahtVCWYsM/story.html

This has scary implications. Trump's team could have used this kind of data to specifically target population masses that they would benefit from by swaying their opinions in certain ways towards certain things, or this data could have been handed over to a foreign power (eg. Russia) to allow for similar targeted mass information warfare, or just general spying on U.S. citizens. This whole mess just keeps getting more and more depressing.

This is basically why they hired CA. Cambridge Analytica are a company that specialises in not only performing data analysis, but also running information warfare campaigns to target social media demographics based on their findings. Their parent company is known for military information warfare, so they've got the expertise to manipulate Joe Everyperson to the n'th degree. They'll try and spin it as "oh we just want to see what our voters are sharing!", but that's nowhere near the truth. CA helped spearhead the social media campaigns and feed manipulation for numerous Republican candidates and a good number of other right wing battles such as Brexit in the last few years.

Is what Cambridge Analytica do actually illegal though? Shady, yes, but a court can only rule within the law. I'm not sure, I'm genuinely asking if there is a case.

The impacts of "Big Data" are going to be huge in our life times if we don't get some control of it now. We can see a clear use of it with the Trump Campaign as Cambridge Analytica shows and their other ventures. We truly are entering into the some of the worst elements of the cyberpunk dystopia very quickly.

That's precisely what investigations and trials exist for.

We can't have pre-existing laws for every shitty thing someone can plan to do to someone else, so maybe this will set a precedent.

To start, they lied to Facebook in saying their data was only for academic purposes. Afterwards, they sold personal information to a third party without anyone's knowledge/permission.

So most likely we're looking at data protection as a minimum with other precedents potentially being set for manipulating the election. I fucking hope so because the other posters are right - CA represents the ability of rich people to buy the opinion of poor people in a way far more dangerous, subtle and successful than ads.

Unless I'm misunderstanding you, and I will admit that I may be, you can't arrest or punish someone for breaking a law that doesn't exist. They would have to tie it to breaking an existing law to be able to do anything.

This is what I'm worried about. It requires lawmakers to forbid it. The lawmakers in question are in power because of CA's services. Unlikely to see any action from them. This is how corruption takes hold.

I would highly doubt that. This just sounds like the Deep State(TM) conspiracy, but about republicans.

The issue is that there are a number of Republicans who will not vote for any measure that reduces their chances of retaining power. I don't see how that's 'Deep state' - it's just a continuation of a trend that has been going on since they compromised their American values to support Donald Trump.

It's "deep State"-esque because you said they were in power BECAUSE of CA's services, implying that they all used it. If you were only talking about freshmen lawmakers or ones that flipped long held seats, then yeah, I would agree with you. But a lot of the old incumbents are there because of name recognition and being gerrymandered in, not because of CA's "services".

This is overdue. Cambridge Analytica has been a major centerpiece of this whole conspiracy. I'm glad to see that they're starting to land on the radar of investigative authorities. Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and other social media companies are responsible in part for radicalization and extremism. This is normal in society - except in the past, it was geographically limited, because socialization occurred physically. Now, it's totally disconnected from geography, opening up the opportunity for radicals and bad-faith actors to specifically target certain vulnerable demographics, overwhelming them with propaganda, misinformation, and outright lies to sway their opinion and change their behavior, all without the person even knowing they're being manipulated. We saw it in 2016, when Russian state actors fostered bitter political rivalry and bolstered racism and hatred with the express goal of undermining American civic unity. What next, though? What happens when these tools inevitably get into the hands of ideological radicals who are pursuing a goal way, way beyond Russia's destabilization attempts? Do we want to live in a reality where Stormfront can explicitly start targeting young white teenagers struggling with their self-identity on social media, slowly radicalizing them into violent white supremacists? The breakdown of geographical constraints on socializing is incredible for humanity, but we need to make sure that bad-faith actors aren't able to abuse it. The sheer amount of data that Cambridge Analytica managed to gain for targeted political advertising could be repurposed for way, way more nefarious shit. This kind of shit is dangerous for democracy - it undermines the idea of voters as rational actors, and makes them incredibly easy to manipulate based on outright lies. We can't expect rational, informed voters to stay that way if targeted psychological warfare tools become commonplace and refined. Eventually, this kind of tech could lead to a breakdown of democracy, with wealthy oligarchs paying for massive-scale, individually-targeted lies and misinformation to sow doubt and eventually change your opinion. It'd flip democracy on its head - "representatives" picking and choosing exactly who votes for them. Except instead of gerrymandering based on rough demographic data, they use incredibly specific demographic data to literally manipulate you emotionally, undermining your critical reasoning and forming you into a voter who supports their interests - instead of the voter making demands of the representative to support their interests. tl;dr regulate facebook if you want democracy