CAMBRIDGE ANALYTICA UP CLOSE, OR
BIG BROTHER GOES INTERNATIONAL
COMPILATION AND COMMENTARY
BY LUCY WARNER
MARCH 22, 2018

SEE WIKIPEDIA FOR A BETTER UNDERSTANDING OF WHAT THIS TERM MEANS.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_analytics


THE FUTURE OF POLITICAL DATA

https://www.techrepublic.com/article/cambridge-analytica-the-future-of-political-data-is-in-the-enterprise/
Cambridge Analytica's Facebook game in politics was just the beginning, the enterprise was next
The controversial data company's product lead spoke to TechRepublic to clarify the firm's role on the Trump campaign and outline a vision for the future of enterprise analytics.
By Dan Patterson | March 19, 2018, 9:38 AM PST
This article was originally published on March 13, 2017.

Updated 3/18/2018: On March 17, 2018, Facebook announced that Cambridge Analytica was suspended for violating the company's standards and practices. TechRepublic's Dan Patterson was one of the early reporters to write about Cambridge Analytica during the 2016 campaign. Patterson spoke with CBS News about how the data firm could have harvested so many Facebook profiles. The interview has been added to this article.

SEE: How a Facebook app scraped millions of people's personal data | Video: Facebook data was misused to sway 2016 voters, reports says (CBS News)


TechRepublic recently reported on controversial tweets by former White House technology staffer Gerrit Lansing and former Trump campaign social media strategist Gary Coby alleging Cambridge Analytica overstated its role in the campaign and the capabilities of the firm's technology. Specifically the company was accused of taking credit for Trump's Facebook advertising strategy and his victories in Michigan and Florida.

The tweets sparked a fiery debate about the role of big data in politics and vertical industries. Big data undeniably played a huge role during the 2016 presidential campaign, and after big elections political data innovations are often adopted by enterprise companies and SMBs. Some political technology firms—particularly partisan startups like NGP VAN and Targeted Victory—are now focused on local and regional races in the US. Other firms, like L2 and Cambridge Analytica, deploy their analytics product across enterprise verticals such as media, finance, and health care.

SEE: Quick glossary: Big data (Tech Pro Research)

More about Big Data
Edge computing: A cheat sheet
5 steps to extracting big data gold
How companies can monetize big data with IoT data control
How the NFL and Amazon unleashed 'Next Gen Stats' to grok football games

Last year in an interview with TechRepublic CEO Alexander Nix reiterated the company's non-partisan status. "We are fundamentally politically agnostic and an apolitical organization," he said. "The high volume of Republican primary candidates this cycle allowed us to enter a competitive market."

Cambridge Analytica famously states its database contains over 5,000 data points on nearly every American consumer. The company is hardly the only big data company to make grand assertions about the power of analytics. Nearly every firm that TechRepublic spoke with while reporting this story agreed that big data is undeniably powerful and expressed concern that "magical" claims undermine the true value of analytics.

WATCH: Documentary shows information revolution of big data (CBS News)

"Faulty products that exaggerate results can mismanage client expectations," said a person familiar with the political technology industry. "Innovation only really succeeds if the product works. In any [business] sector, if one company exaggerates it harms the entire ecosystem. It erodes trust in the market."

Cambridge Analytica refuted the allegations and clarified its role on the campaign in mid-February during a 30-minute phone conversation. Portions of the audio interview, however, were off record so we asked Cambridge Analytica's head of product, Matthew Oczkowski, to respond to the allegations and clarify how their technology works.

Can you contextualize the controversy regarding the tweets from Lansing and Coby?

At CA, we break up our data into three buckets: political, commercial, and 1st party. We work with several of the main voter file providers, depending on the preference of our clients, to access vote history and voter profiles. We also access many of the top commercial data providers on a licensing basis; this data includes things like general demographics, geographics, purchase history, interests, etc. Finally, we collect data internally from R&D projects like internal surveys and research, exclusive data relationships, and data collection through direct response projects.

Can you articulate what Cambridge Analytica's technology is, how it works, and how you applied your tech for the Trump campaign?

At our core, we are a data and behavioral science company. Simply put, we help organizations figure out who to talk to and what to say to them. We believe that demographic-based marketing has become relatively obsolete and that understanding the underlying motivations of an individual are a far more effective way to communicate with someone. We deploy this research through both digital and television, which serve as the vehicles to reach these individuals.

For the Trump campaign, we served as the data agency of record, but our role quickly evolved as the cycle progressed. Our three core pillars of execution were data science and analytics, digital marketing (mostly persuasion and GOTV), and polling/research. Having a large amount of control and input into each of these three areas allowed us to be extremely efficient and reactive. It also allowed us to easily integrate with the staff at Giles-Parscale and the RNC.

Our approach allows our clients, like the Trump campaign, to more efficiently spend their resources and better persuade and mobilize their advocates.

Since data is the underpinning of every actionable insight that an organization would want to make, the applications of what we do are endless. With the Trump campaign, we assisted with everything from resource allocation for media buys, calculating the most efficient candidate travel stops, influencing the content in surrogate speeches, and personalizing messaging to the individual voter.

SEE: Hiring kit: Data architect (Tech Pro Research)

We learned that no two campaigns are alike and that there is no 'playbook' for the standard way to run a data, digital, or technology program on a campaign. Developing a custom program five months out from election day proved to have its unique challenges. Also, the style of President Trump as a candidate was far different from what we have seen with other candidates. This required us to changes some of our approaches to more quickly measure the attitudes of the electorate.

Hindsight is always 20/20, but going back and doing it all over again I would have traded money for time. I say this on most campaigns that I work on, but a bit more maturity in a few of the programs we set up may have yielded even better results. Given the outcome of the election, we are more than happy with the result.

At the end of the day, people are people. Convincing someone to show up and vote or donate for a political candidate is correlative with many issues businesses face everyday. Whether it be finding new customers, or improving brand loyalty, many of our techniques are suited to do just that.

Regarding your tech, does the firm build tech in-house, acquire tech from startups and other companies, or a mixture?

We acquire data in a number of ways - everything from commercial licensing, political exchange agreements, internal investment (R&D projects), and proprietary relationships with partner companies.

We most certainly do build tech in house. We recently hired our CTO, Darren Bolding, who served as CTO of the RNC this past cycle. Darren and I manage, and are currently expanding, our in-house team of engineers to productize our offering a bit more. We aim to move more towards general automation of what we do in the form of a SaaS product.

SEE: IT leader's guide to Agile development (Tech Pro Research)

Big data is a huge business trend. What's your take on the current state of political big data? And what does the future look like?

We don't consider ourselves a 'big data' company, we are a data analytics company. Many organization out there want to serve as the database of record for their clients. We aim to be the layer on top of that, which provides our clients with actionable insights - essentially acting as the brain behind the decision-making process.

We've come a long way, but there is still a lot of work to be done on the side of automation. Campaigns move so quickly that often it's difficult to keep up. The more automation we can bring to the process outside of the campaign HQ will greatly increase our speed in delivering insights to the decision makers.

Keep up to date on all of the latest in tech. Click here to subscribe to the TechRepublic Best of the Week newsletter.


Also see

Trump-linked data firm Cambridge Analytica harvested data on 50 million Facebook profiles to help target voters (ZDNet)
Facebook, Cambridge Analytica and Trump: What you need to know (CNET)
EU to investigate Facebook and Cambridge Analytica data misuse (CNET)Can Facebook be blamed for Cambridge Analytica?
(CNET)
Election tech: The truth about Cambridge Analytica's political big data (TechRepublic)
Cambridge Analytica: 'We know what you want before you want it' (TechRepublic)
Election tech: Lies, damned lies, and statistics (TechRepublic)
A data visualization of Trump trends on social media (TechRepublic)
IT Security in the Snowden Era (ZDNet)
Russia's role in political hacks: What's the debate? (CNET)
Cyberwar: The smart person's guide (TechRepublic)
s6cambridgeanalytica.jpg

RELATED TOPICS: DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION INTERNET OF THINGS CXO ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE DATA MANAGEMENT

About Dan Patterson
Dan is a Senior Writer for TechRepublic. He covers cybersecurity and the intersection of technology, politics and government.


http://www.bbc.com/news/world-43476762
Cambridge Analytica: The data firm's global influence
March 21, 2018, 3:27 pm, 7 hours ago
Photograph -- Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix has been suspended amid the controversy. GETTY IMAGES

The company accused of using the personal data of millions of Facebook users to influence how people vote is not shy about its international portfolio.

Political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica is facing questions over whether it used personal data to sway the outcome of the US 2016 presidential election and the UK Brexit referendum.

But its reach extends well beyond the UK and US, with its website boasting of supporting more than 100 campaigns across five continents.

Media captionAlexander Nix, CEO of Cambridge Analytica was filmed by undercover reporters for Channel 4 News

The company has suspended its CEO, Alexander Nix, who was filmed as part of a Channel 4 investigation giving examples of how the firm could swing elections around the world with underhand tactics such as smear campaigns and honey traps.

Cambridge Analytica: The story so far
Warrant sought to inspect data firm
How to protect your Facbook data

The UK-based company, which denies any wrongdoing, has an extensive record of work abroad. Here's what we know about it.

Europe

As part of the Channel 4 investigation, executives said Cambridge Analytica and its parent company Strategic Communications Laboratories (SCL) had worked in more than 200 elections across the world, including in the Czech Republic.

"We've just used a different organisation to run a very, very successful project in an Eastern European country where... no-one even knew they were there," company executive Mark Turnbull said.

Cambridge Analytica's website also says it was involved in political campaigning in Italy in 2012, on behalf of a "resurgent political party last successful in the 1980s".

"CA's suggested reforms allowed the party to perform beyond its initial expectations at a time of turbulence in Italian politics," it says.

But the role of SCL goes back much further. It claims to have helped the Orange Revolution in 2004 in Ukraine which helped bring the pro-Western President Viktor Yushchenko to power.

"SCL succeeded in maintaining the cohesion of the coalition to ensure a hard-fought victory," an old post on the SCL website reads.

Image copyrightGETTY IMAGES
Image caption
SCL says it was hired to "erode and weaken" anti-government opposition in Donetsk

More recently, SCL says it was hired by the Ukrainian government to provide "localised communications campaigns" to help them win back control of Donetsk during the conflict in eastern Ukraine.

"The final project report was delivered to the President of Ukraine...this report was pivotal in later national decisions," the company says.

Kenya

Cambridge Analytica was used twice to help secure victory for Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta - first in 2013, then again in 2017.

Officially, the company's website boasts of doing in-depth research to uncover the issues driving voters in the country.

But Mr Turnbull told Channel 4 their input actually went much further.

"We have rebranded the entire party twice, written the manifesto, done research, analysis, messaging. I think we wrote all the speeches and we staged the whole thing - so just about every element of this candidate," he said.

Cambridge Analytica's Kenya role queried

Mr Kenyatta's Jubilee Party has downplayed the impact of the group, saying it employed the company's parent company, SCL, to help with branding.

But the country's main opposition coalition - the National Super Alliance (Nasa) - has called for a full investigation to be carried out.

"This was a criminal enterprise which clearly wanted to subvert the will of the people - through manipulation, through propaganda," official Norman Magaya told the BBC.

Image copyrightGETTY IMAGES
Image caption
The firm says it controlled "every element" of President Kenyatta's election victory last year

Mexico

In July 2017, Cambridge Analytica revealed that it had teamed up with a phone app in Mexico and Colombia called Pig.gi, which gives users free service in exchange for watching adverts and taking surveys.

The firm was hoping to use data mined from Pig.gi to help a candidate in Mexico's July 2018 presidential election, according to Bloomberg.

"There's a huge opportunity in this country to find the issues that are important for people and actually turn people out to vote," Cambridge Analytica's vice-president of business development, Brittany Kaiser, said.

Separately, it was reported in October that the head of operations for Cambridge Analytica in Mexico, Arielle Dale Karro, had posted an advertisement on a Facebook page for foreigners living in the country.

The post sought people "with significant political experience" who were interested in becoming a campaign manager in one of eight Mexican states, Buzzfeed reported.

Cambridge Analytica later denied that Ms Karro was carrying out any political work for the firm. Mr Nix also stated that "Cambridge Analytica is not working for any political party in Mexico".

Media captionFormer Cambridge Analytica employee Christopher Wylie says the firm planted fake news

Brazil

Cambridge Analytica was reportedly "prospecting for clients in Brazil's presidential race" that is due to take place later this year.

CA Ponte, a partnership between Cambridge Analytica and Brazilian consultancy firm Ponte Estrategia, "had been in touch with representatives of three potential candidates", according to Bloomberg.

The partnership's director André Torretta told the El Pais newspaper [in Portuguese] that he had been approached by two presidential campaigns but had not reached a deal with either.

India

Cambridge Analytica is part of the India branch of the SCL group which offers "political campaign management" among its services.

It lists India's two main political parties - the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Congress - among its clients.

Himanshu Sharma, the firm's vice president says on his publicly available LinkedIn profile that the company has "successfully managed four election campaigns for the BJP".

He names among them the 2014 general election which swept Prime Minister Narendra Modi to power.

However both parties have denied any links with the company.

The head of the BJP's social media unit Amit Malviya told the BBC that the party had "not heard of SCL Group... so there is no question of us working with them".

And the Congress party said it had never used SCL or any of its affiliate companies as it has its own data analytical team.

Media captionMr Nix spoke to BBC Newsnight before the Channel 4 report was aired on Monday night. He declined to be interviewed after the undercover footage was broadcast
Malaysia
In the Channel 4 investigation, Malaysia was named as one of the countries in which Cambridge Analytica had operated.

A member of the country's opposition party is now calling on Prime Minister Najib Razak to reveal if he used the firm in the 2013 general election.

"Prime Minister Najib Razak must explain if he used Cambridge Analytica to manipulate voters... and whether he is using unethical manipulation techniques in the upcoming [election]," Wan Saiful Wan Jan said in a statement.

Mr Razak has denied using the company, although its website says it supported his party "with a targeted messaging campaign highlighting their school improvements since 2008".


CAMBRIDGE ANALYTICA IS QUITE A PLAYER WORLD POLITICS, AND POLICIES AS WELL? IS IT SUSPICIOUS THAT THE APP CAMBRIDGE ANALYTICA USED TO “SCRAPE” OFF THE DATA WAS A FACEBOOK APP? IS THIS A DOUBLE LINK WITH TRUMP? ENTERPRISE ANALYTICS – SEE:


Enterprise Analytics definition

Enterprise analytics refers to the process of having data, business and process analytical capabilities across an enterprise. It provides organizations with the ability to collect, analyze and process analytical data in all or most functions of the business.

https://www.techrepublic.com/article/cambridge-analytica-the-future-of-political-data-is-in-the-enterprise/
Cambridge Analytica's Facebook game in politics was just the beginning, the enterprise was next
The controversial data company's product lead spoke to TechRepublic to clarify the firm's role on the Trump campaign and outline a vision for the future of ENTERPRISE ANALYTICS.
By Dan Patterson | March 19, 2018, 9:38 AM PST

Updated 3/18/2018: On March 17, 2018, Facebook announced that Cambridge Analytica was suspended for violating the company's standards and practices. TechRepublic's Dan Patterson was one of the early reporters to write about Cambridge Analytica during the 2016 campaign. Patterson spoke with CBS News about how the data firm could have harvested so many Facebook profiles. The interview has been added to this article.

SEE: How a Facebook app scraped millions of people's personal data | Video: Facebook data was misused to sway 2016 voters, reports says (CBS News)

This article was originally published on March 13, 2017.

TechRepublic recently reported on controversial tweets by former White House technology staffer Gerrit Lansing and former Trump campaign social media strategist Gary Coby alleging Cambridge Analytica overstated its role in the campaign and the capabilities of the firm's technology. Specifically the company was accused of taking credit for Trump's Facebook advertising strategy and his victories in Michigan and Florida.

The tweets sparked a fiery debate about the role of big data in politics and vertical industries. Big data undeniably played a huge role during the 2016 presidential campaign, and after big elections political data innovations are often adopted by enterprise companies and SMBs. Some political technology firms—particularly partisan startups like NGP VAN and Targeted Victory—are now focused on local and regional races in the US. Other firms, like L2 and Cambridge Analytica, deploy their analytics product across enterprise verticals such as media, finance, and health care.

SEE: Quick glossary: Big data (Tech Pro Research)

More about Big Data
Edge computing: A cheat sheet
5 steps to extracting big data gold
How companies can monetize big data with IoT data control
How the NFL and Amazon unleashed 'Next Gen Stats' to grok football games

Last year in an interview with TechRepublic CEO Alexander Nix reiterated the company's non-partisan status. "We are fundamentally politically agnostic and an apolitical organization," he said. "The high volume of Republican primary candidates this cycle allowed us to enter a competitive market."

Cambridge Analytica famously states its database contains over 5,000 data points on nearly every American consumer. The company is hardly the only big data company to make grand assertions about the power of analytics. Nearly every firm that TechRepublic spoke with while reporting this story agreed that big data is undeniably powerful and expressed concern that "magical" claims undermine the true value of analytics.

GDPR: The new data privacy regulation
GDPR affects all areas of IT, from Cloud to the edge, and companies will have to take the necessary steps to improve integrity and minimize risk. Will you be ready by May 2018?
SPONSORED BY INTEL
WATCH: Documentary shows information revolution of big data (CBS News)

"Faulty products that exaggerate results can mismanage client expectations," said a person familiar with the political technology industry. "Innovation only really succeeds if the product works. In any [business] sector, if one company exaggerates it harms the entire ecosystem. It erodes trust in the market."

Cambridge Analytica refuted the allegations and clarified its role on the campaign in mid-February during a 30-minute phone conversation. Portions of the audio interview, however, were off record so we asked Cambridge Analytica's head of product, Matthew Oczkowski, to respond to the allegations and clarify how their technology works.

Can you contextualize the controversy regarding the tweets from Lansing and Coby?

At CA, we break up our data into three buckets: political, commercial, and 1st party. We work with several of the main voter file providers, depending on the preference of our clients, to access vote history and voter profiles. We also access many of the top commercial data providers on a licensing basis; this data includes things like general demographics, geographics, purchase history, interests, etc. Finally, we collect data internally from R&D projects like internal surveys and research, exclusive data relationships, and data collection through direct response projects.

Can you articulate what Cambridge Analytica's technology is, how it works, and how you applied your tech for the Trump campaign?

At our core, we are a data and behavioral science company. Simply put, we help organizations figure out who to talk to and what to say to them. We believe that demographic-based marketing has become relatively obsolete and that understanding the underlying motivations of an individual are a far more effective way to communicate with someone. We deploy this research through both digital and television, which serve as the vehicles to reach these individuals.

For the Trump campaign, we served as the data agency of record, but our role quickly evolved as the cycle progressed. Our three core pillars of execution were data science and analytics, digital marketing (mostly persuasion and GOTV), and polling/research. Having a large amount of control and input into each of these three areas allowed us to be extremely efficient and reactive. It also allowed us to easily integrate with the staff at Giles-Parscale and the RNC.

Our approach allows our clients, like the Trump campaign, to more efficiently spend their resources and better persuade and mobilize their advocates.

Since data is the underpinning of every actionable insight that an organization would want to make, the applications of what we do are endless. With the Trump campaign, we assisted with everything from resource allocation for media buys, calculating the most efficient candidate travel stops, influencing the content in surrogate speeches, and personalizing messaging to the individual voter.

SEE: Hiring kit: Data architect (Tech Pro Research)

We learned that no two campaigns are alike and that there is no 'playbook' for the standard way to run a data, digital, or technology program on a campaign. Developing a custom program five months out from election day proved to have its unique challenges. Also, the style of President Trump as a candidate was far different from what we have seen with other candidates. This required us to changes some of our approaches to more quickly measure the attitudes of the electorate.

Hindsight is always 20/20, but going back and doing it all over again I would have traded money for time. I say this on most campaigns that I work on, but a bit more maturity in a few of the programs we set up may have yielded even better results. Given the outcome of the election, we are more than happy with the result.

At the end of the day, people are people. Convincing someone to show up and vote or donate for a political candidate is correlative with many issues businesses face everyday. Whether it be finding new customers, or improving brand loyalty, many of our techniques are suited to do just that.

Regarding your tech, does the firm build tech in-house, acquire tech from startups and other companies, or a mixture?

We acquire data in a number of ways - everything from commercial licensing, political exchange agreements, internal investment (R&D projects), and proprietary relationships with partner companies.

We most certainly do build tech in house. We recently hired our CTO, Darren Bolding, who served as CTO of the RNC this past cycle. Darren and I manage, and are currently expanding, our in-house team of engineers to productize our offering a bit more. We aim to move more towards general automation of what we do in the form of a SaaS product.

SEE: IT leader's guide to Agile development (Tech Pro Research)

Big data is a huge business trend. What's your take on the current state of political big data? And what does the future look like?

>We don't consider ourselves a 'big data' company, we are a data analytics company. Many organization out there want to serve as the database of record for their clients. We aim to be the layer on top of that, which provides our clients with actionable insights - essentially acting as the brain behind the decision-making process.

We've come a long way, but there is still a lot of work to be done on the side of automation. Campaigns move so quickly that often it's difficult to keep up. The more automation we can bring to the process outside of the campaign HQ will greatly increase our speed in delivering insights to the decision makers.

Keep up to date on all of the latest in tech. Click here to subscribe to the TechRepublic Best of the Week newsletter.

Also see

Trump-linked data firm Cambridge Analytica harvested data on 50 million Facebook profiles to help target voters (ZDNet)
Facebook, Cambridge Analytica and Trump: What you need to know (CNET)
EU to investigate Facebook and Cambridge Analytica data misuse (CNET)Can Facebook be blamed for Cambridge Analytica?
(CNET)
Election tech: The truth about Cambridge Analytica's political big data (TechRepublic)
Cambridge Analytica: 'We know what you want before you want it' (TechRepublic)
Election tech: Lies, damned lies, and statistics (TechRepublic)
A data visualization of Trump trends on social media (TechRepublic)
IT Security in the Snowden Era (ZDNet)
Russia's role in political hacks: What's the debate? (CNET)
Cyberwar: The smart person's guide (TechRepublic)

About Dan Patterson
Dan is a Senior Writer for TechRepublic. He covers cybersecurity and the intersection of technology, politics and government.