The usual abiding fear about the new technology giants, like Google (or Facebook, or Microsoft, or Apple, or Amazon, just for starters), is that ruthless politicians might get to control them – and, through them, us. However, that fear seems rather naive when compared with the sinister truths emerging from the international Cambridge Analytica scandal.
At first, the scandal might appear to be as arcane and remote, at least from Malta, as the name of the ‘political research’ consultancy itself. It is anything but – even if you dismiss the idea that the consultancy was involved in our last general election, or, even if it was, that it made no substantial difference to the result.
Let’s take things one at a time, beginning with the political firestorm that has broken out in the UK, and which has spread elsewhere, threatening to engulf leading politicians, like US Senator Ted Cruz, who made use of the services of Cambridge Analytica during thelast Republican presidential primaries in 2015/16.
Cambridge Analytica is a firm that combines expertise in psychology and the processing of massive amounts of personal data. It claims to be able to help its clients micro-target their voters by giving them a detailed psychological profile of individual voters, such that their votes might be swayed not just by giving them the policy they want, but by messaging them in a manner that could get them to switch vote (or abstain) for reasons that might even be contrary to those same voters’ interests.
Cambridge Analytica’s ‘psychographics’, the psychological model that it works with, are still fairly primitive by absolute standards. Using the model, you can’t just manipulate any mind about anything, not least someone who is aware of and trained to recognise the ‘persuasive’ techniques.
But the model is very sophisticated in terms of its predecessors. It makes the socio-economic categories used customarily by pollsters seem like astrology.
Instead of looking at what you do for a living, it looks at the data that, say, your Facebook page has about you – your photos, your friends, your music, your likes and dislikes – and maps them out to ferret out information about your other preferences that you believe you’ve kept to yourself.
Cambridge Analytica enabled Ted Cruz to win the Iowa primaries because he knew exactly what small pockets of voters wanted to hear. The company is also widely suspected to have been involved in the Leave campaign during the UK’s Brexit referendum, although it has denied this. Just as it has denied any involvement with the Russian effort to interfere with the 2016 US presidential campaign.
So far, so good. What’s wrong about a data-driven grassroots campaign that simply keeps up with what technology can offer you? Nothing in itself. Micro-targeting, based on polling, has been used for a long time in the US – it’s widely credited with helping Bill Clinton get re-elected in 1996. And the older techniques of street-leaders and door-to-door campaigning could arguably be described as identical, except for the information gathering technology.
However, there are three significant differences. One has to do with how Cambridge Analytica’s Facebook data – on millions of people – has been obtained. The charge is that it was obtained unethically and often without people even knowing about it. Cambridge Analytica denies the charge but a whistleblower has told the Guardian newspaper otherwise.
The second has to do with the messaging based on the data. Political persuasion is fine – but surely we need to know that it’s taking place. Otherwise it’s manipulation, when our critical faculties are switched off, and where fact-checking might seem less important.
If subliminal advertising is disallowed, and cooling-off periods are permitted, for the purchase of relatively trivial items, how can it be ethical to permit persuasive techniques with similar effects for important political decisions?
Finally, there is the issue of hidden agenda. Ted Cruz is a conservative politician whose agenda is well-known. But a political consultancy firm can work for anyone.
What laws do we need to pass to restrain ruthless political mercenaries from acquiring our personal data and targeting us like unsuspecting consumers, if not idiots?
It is mercenary. It can work for a foreign power. It can work for other commercial interests, that may have an interest in, say, Brexit, that have little to do with British self-interest.
It can also switch sides. It can acquire data by being hired by one political party – but then sell the same data, some time down the line, to another bidder.
None of these dangers are simply theoretical. The Cambridge Analytica files, being published by the Guardian (and its sister newspaper, The Observer), show that there is good reason to doubt the company’s ethical standards.
The bosses have told undercover reporters of how their services include blackmail, spies and fake news to help clients. They also told them they use several company names in contracts to disguise their involvement, since they prefer to operate in the shadows.
The company has responded by denying that it does any of these things, just as it has denied using any data that has not been obtained by legal, ethical means. The denials, however, sound hollow.
Such dangers show the simple-mindedness of thinking of the problem simply as a matter of whether politicians can control (say) Google or Facebook.
It leaves out, for a start, the question of which politicians – national or international. It leaves out the possibility that it is the technology company that might control the politicians.
It leaves out the fact that it’s not just a matter of a government knowing what we’re doing. It destroys private life not simply by having someone snooping around on us.
It turns out that, while we are priding ourselves on having disengaged from politics and grown out of it, politics has in fact turned round and swallowed us whole: we don’t notice but every consumer preference and loud-mouthed opinion, ostensibly the exercise of free choice, will be registered so that someone else can control us and our big decisions so much better.
All these considerations are important for any democracy. They are even more salient to Malta in the light of a recent report by the political blogger, Manuel Delia, who has said that an app distributed by the government not long before Malta’s last general election, required much more (sensitive) personal information from users than such an app would require.
Such personal information requests bear the marks of the kind information-gathering campaign that Cambridge Analytica specialises in.
So the first thing we need, in the public interest, is to know why that app had such unnecessary features. The second is for Labour (or all political parties, for that matter) to be asked whether it has ever engaged Cambridge Analytica or any data mining political consultancy.
The third thing we need, collectively, is some clarity on pressing issues.
What are the limits we are ready to impose, legally, on political parties who engage political consultancies like Cambridge Analytica?
What laws do we need to pass to restrain ruthless political mercenaries from acquiring our personal data and targeting us like unsuspecting consumers, if not idiots?
If we don’t treat the matter as urgent, it won’t mean that we’re apathetic and content with our freedoms. It will mean we are cavalier and reckless with our liberties.
ranierfsadni@europe.com