🥩 Case Study: Voter Profiling Firms
Citizens were given COVID "decree violation" scores to help swing elections
What is a Voter Profiling Firm:
These firms collect their own data and purchase data from other Data Brokers to create a “profile” of an individual
read my first post on Data Brokers if you haven’t already
They are intended to predict the likelihood that an individual agrees or disagrees with a particular party or political stance, like a belief in gun control. They are also used to predict a person’s likelihood of voting
The scoring systems can also enable campaigns to quietly aim different, and perhaps contradictory, messages at different voters with little public accountability or oversight
If you are ever saying to yourself “Why Am I Seeing That Political Ad?” it is directly due to one of your voter profile scores
Blatant Invasion of Privacy:
Voter Analytics firm PreditWise is able to analyze nearly two billion global positioning system (GPS) pings to get "real-time, ultra-granular locations patterns."
PredictWise says its data "tracks the opinions, attitudes, and behaviors" of over 260 million Americans – a figure that represents 78% of the entire US population of 335 million
Basic Voter Score Example’s:
“Marriage” model: score ranges on scale of 0 - 1 to indicate an individual likelihood of supporting laws that preserve traditional marriage
“Trump Resistance” model: score between 0 and 100 based on their likelihood of opposing trump.
Based off of your score political campaigns can target you, especially if you are a swing voter they have the ability to decide elections
US citizens were given secret COVID "decree violation" scores
What Happened: Voter analytics firm PredictWise harvested location data from millions of US cellphones during the initial COVID lock down months and used this data to assign a "Covid-19 decree violation" score to individuals
People who were "on the go more often than their neighbors" were given a high Covid-19 decree violation score
People who mostly or always stayed at home were given a low Covid-19 decree violation score.'
Why it matters:
Not only did they monitor millions of Americans' compliance with COVID lock down decrees, but they also combined this data with follow-up surveys to assign "COVID concern" scores to the people who were being surveilled
PredictWise then used this data to help Democrats in several swing states to target more than 350,000 "COVID concerned" Republicans with COVID related campaign ads to help swing those votes blue, which worked
Another example…Democrats were able to deploy this “real-time location model to open up just over 40,000 persuasion targets that normally would have fallen off" for Mark Kelly who was running for Senate at the time and has now been elected
What can I do to prevent this:
This is a longer term issue to fix in your privacy setup and we will continue to lock down our settings in coming weeks
Just know everything you do even if its small is helping reduce privacy invasion by data brokers and voter profiling firms
General ideology: Always remember Third Party Doctrine!
Every service you use is using your data and it is legal to do so.
Reduce the use and delete services / apps.
Lock down privacy settings over time and use CASH