ActivePaper Archive Be wary of who occupies your mind - Houston Chronicle, 3/21/2018

Be wary of who occupies your mind

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Christopher Wylie, who helped found Cambridge Analytica: “We exploited Facebook to harvest millions of people’s profiles.”

Andrew Testa / New York Times

I want a piece of your mind.

No, I’m not conducting a poll or asking for your viewpoint. I want to occupy space in your brain, for at least 10 minutes.

My hope is that you will read this column, find the information useful and remember it. If I succeed, then you will subscribe to the newspaper, and the Houston Chronicle will continue to make a profit.

Competition, though, is fierce for the 16 hours a day most people are awake, and your options are limitless. While I am honest about my intentions and promise not to use mind tricks to manipulate you, many of my competitors are not so scrupulous.

Over the weekend, London’s Observer newspaper revealed how adata firm leveraged Face-book user data to manipulate how voters think about our most important civic issues. It’s not illegal, but maybe it should be.

The implicit bargain of social media companies is that in return for allowing them to collect data about your likes, dislikes and habits, they provide a global forum that is paid for with advertisements that you will find useful. The more data you provide, the more accurate the ads and the more money social media companies make from advertising.

Facebook allowed third parties for years to use quizzes to learn more about your personality. If you took a quiz, you allowed access to your Facebook profile and revealed all kinds of things about your personality. To gain those insights, the quiz might ask which character from the 1980s’ coming of age movie “The Breakfast Club” is most like you.

By combining this data with your credit history and dozens of other private databases, an advertising firm can create a very accurate dossier of you and extrapolate your profile to millions of others who didn’t take the quiz, a science called psychographics. If the ads that Facebook and Google show you are laughably inappropriate, congratulations, you’ve stumped the machines. If the ads are eerily accurate, they’ve got you.

If the only goal was to show you auseful ad, that’s not a bad thing. But it gets insidious when you apply behavioral psychology to the profiles to begin manipulating people.

Marketers have long used neuroscience to better understand what types of messages can change consumer behavior. They know fear and perceived injustice, for example, can be powerful motivators, as Machiavelli told us centuries ago.

The Observer revealed how Cambridge Analytica, a U.K.-based data firm, took data from 50 million Facebook users and used it to target people with political messages, some of which included disinformation. The United Kingdom’s Brexit campaign and President Donald Trump’s political committee were among the company’s clients.

Those campaigns then paid Facebook and other social media companies to precisely deliver these ads to people most likely to believe them. These campaigns occupied the minds of hundreds of thousands of people who shared these ads with the like-minded, spreading the virus further.

“We exploited Face-book to harvest millions of people’s profiles. And built models to exploit what we knew about them and target their inner demons,” said Christopher Wylie, who worked with a Cambridge University academic to obtain the data, according to the Observer.

Cambridge Analytica is not the only firm to do this. Russian agents are using the same methods to destabilize our country. Last year, they even convinced 60 people to protest against each other outside a Houston Islamic center. And while Cambridge Analytica worked for conservative causes, there is nothing to stop a liberal group from using the same tools.

The past two years have shown us how corporations, politicians and agitators have the technology to mess with our minds. Their techniques will certainly become more subtle and more dangerous.

There is an alternative to getting your news from mysterious websites relayed by social media, and you are reading one right now. Our only goal is to provide useful information that you think is worthy of the subscription price. We promise you the facts, whether they please you or not, and we don’t hide our identities.

Congress will soon hold hearings on how our personal data is being used against us in nefarious ways. A key issue is that your information belongs to the company that collects it, not to you. That limits what actions you can take when it is misused or stolen.

American lawmakers should consider a version of Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation, which gives citizens control of their personal data. Our information should belong to us so that we can take it away from companies that abuse it.

Social media sites have become our public square, with Twitter serving as a soapbox and Facebook where we talk about the day’s news. Oratory, whether in-person or via the internet, can be used for good or evil, and the audience must ultimately decide whom to trust.

Secretly using our personal information to covertly manipulate our behavior is something entirely different, and Congress should make it illegal.

Chris Tomlinson is the Chronicle’s business columnist.chris.tomlinson@chron.com twitter.com/cltomlinson