In 2008 , the Obama campaign engage the help of Facebook and Google kingpin to facilitate raise massive sums from a lot of belittled donors . Back then , the key was just a few piece of data — today , that information excavation effort has been spread out to a immense and very creepy-crawly degree .
Mother Jones hasa great profileof Obama for America ’s data czar Harper Reed and how he ’s transformed the effort into an entropy crunching machine that knows more about you than you cerebrate . perchance you ’re like the two million people who ratify up for OFA ‘s social internet back in 2008 ? Poof , the campaign has the information on your Facebook profile . Did you sign up for OFA’sonline organizing tool , Dashboard ? Then virtually everything you do from signing request to writing message is mined for selective information that ’s used to ensure you get the correct fundraising email , the correctly script call from a earphone bank , and the good pitch when a poll taker pink on your door .
And that ’s just the commencement . Even if you have n’t volunteer yourself to the campaign , they ’ve get a long ton of entropy that comes from five major sources . Mother Jones report :
There ’s your introductory elector file , publicly usable info provided by each Department of State , which includes your name , computer address , and ballot phonograph recording . The political party ’s file , compiled by partizan establishment like VoteBuilder , include more elaborated information . Did you vote in a caucus ? Did you show up at a straw poll ? Did you offer for a candidate ? Did you bring bite to a grassroots sports meeting - up ? Did you talk to a poll taker about pileus - and - swap ? Contribution datum , which the campaign accumulate itself , let in both public information that campaigns disclose to the Federal Election Commission ( FEC ) and nonpublic data like the names of modest - dollar sign donors .
Of course , data point aggregation is n’t especially new in political science , but what ’s surprising is the size and scope of the Obama campaign ’s efforts . Rather than outsource its data trouble to a shadowy political consulting firm , OFA is doing the work house with experient technology startup guru at the helm . We ’ll recognize in November whether or not it works , but in the meanwhile , we ca n’t help but feel a piffling exposed . [ Mother Jones ]
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