Love Donald Trump? Wish there didn’t have to be a president at all? How about Barack Obama? Both candidates hacked the electoral process to some extent. I don’t mean literally, but rather in the various ways they approached the challenge of getting elected to the nation’s highest office — using digital solutions that worked.
Whatever your take on today’s political landscape, chances are better than average that an accurate assessment of it exists in the form of a dossier ready to be deployed for a price. And no matter how unique you imagine yourself to be, your political views have probably been shaped by the information in that dossier.
Big data is everywhere. It’s an incredibly complex cocktail of information — your information from some pretty unthinkable sources — all of it analyzed, run through proprietary algorithms, and then deployed by marketing professionals to get you drunk on this or that idea — often things that would have never entered your mind otherwise.
What information is part of big data?
Unless you live in a solar-powered treehouse on a frozen island surrounded by talking auklets and puffins, you’re in the mix. That said, there are data points for Republicans who have solar panels on their roofs.
{mosads}Any data that is available and associated with a specific individual has the potential to find its way into the big data info-blender that increasingly predicates what you wear, how you eat, whom you choose for public office, and — with the help of satellite imagery — whether or not your house is equipped with solar panels.
The data can seem weird. It includes how you surf the web, what devices you prefer, and which web browser you like. There’s every purchase you’ve ever made in a loyalty program. If you’re a gamer, it’s the games you play and when you play them. The data might include granular stuff, like the programs you leave open in your internet browser, the contents of your email if you use certain services, and of course. the things you post on social media. It can be anything from your 5K runs, court proceedings, subscriptions, online and offline purchases — even your credit profile.
The point of all this can be easily lost. There is no opt-out. Your information, or at least some of it, is in the hands (or on the servers) of the big data-crunching companies. You can worry about that, and even try to minimize your exposure by being more careful about what loyalty programs — if any — you use, and how you conduct your affairs online, but you’re already in the big data ecosystem.
At the end of the day, you really shouldn’t spend too much time worrying about the collection of data, but focus instead on who’s using it and why.
Does big data belong in political races?
This may sound ridiculous, but I’m not sure big data belongs in campaigns. Big data has killed the dream of how politicians are supposed to work (never mind that they don’t). As data gets increasingly yoked to voter motivation, gone are the simpler days of who a politician is, what they stand for, and what that person will and can do if elected.
Winning by any means necessary is a major cost of big data. Politicians have always been in the business of over-promising and under-delivering, but it used to be talent, ability, and accomplishments that mattered most. Today, a campaigner’s ability to read a crowd and give them what they want is quaintly obsolete. Think President Trump disproves the point? His campaign was an extremely heavy user of big data. It’s easy to move a crowd when you have access to their collective psychographics.
Big data takes talent out of the equation
Pick your favorite movie about artificial intelligence, and I’ll wager it includes a plotline where the perfect mind veers off the tracks of humanity into some diabolical plan. Even with the advent of super-processing programs, like IBM Watson, which are supposed to be cognitively naturalistic, the human spark is gone. What people will accept or choose given the right stimuli, and what will actually make life better are two very different things — a difference that artificial intelligence cannot compute.
Fake news is one of the most obvious ways big data can drastically affect the outcome of an election. Whether that “news” is social engineering driven by foreign botnets programmed to enhance the chances of the “right” candidate, or a more localized attempt foisted by partisan hacks doesn’t matter. With the right data, either party (and for that matter any third party) can create fake news designed to influence election results by raising a voter’s hackles or making them want to stay home on election day.
At the end of the day, big data is great for selling stuff, which is why it should have a far less pivotal place in electoral politics. You can’t opt out, but you can get better at recognizing when you’re getting played.
Adam K. Levin is chairman and founder of CyberScout (formerly IDT911) and co-founder of Credit.com. He is a former director of the New Jersey Division of Consumer Affairs and is the author of Swiped: How to Protect Yourself In a World Full of Scammers, Phishers, and Identity Thieves, which debuted at #1 on the Amazon Hot New Releases List.
The views expressed by contributors are their own and are not the views of The Hill.