Tuesday, April 18, 2017

Facebook likes; I have none, and that might profile me. Who you are and what your hot buttons are for political pushing; and Cambridge Analytica - psycho voodoo, or a real worry?

Without it, readers might be guessing this blog is aimed to channel the ghost of Andrew Breitbart, all of his viewpoints and biases intact. With it, if you pay the piper, you can perhaps better judge the Crabgrass tune. The Reg reported.

"One can enter the political race at much lower cost, and we could see that with Brexit, but also Trump and Bernie Sanders," Kosinski says. "It completely changes the economics of political targeting."

And it could allow politicians to reach groups who have previously been ignored and may not have bothered voting as a result. "With both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, they attracted huge followings among groups of people who previously were not politically active," Kosinski says.

Hey, we knew all that five years ago. We read the paper. Poised ever ready for each new PNAS email subscription installment.

Facebook likes, per the paper, opening abstract:

We show that easily accessible digital records of behavior, Facebook Likes, can be used to automatically and accurately predict a range of highly sensitive personal attributes including: sexual orientation, ethnicity, religious and political views, personality traits, intelligence, happiness, use of addictive substances, parental separation, age, and gender. The analysis presented is based on a dataset of over 58,000 volunteers who provided their Facebook Likes, detailed demographic profiles, and the results of several psychometric tests. The proposed model uses dimensionality reduction for preprocessing the Likes data, which are then entered into logistic/linear regression to predict individual psychodemographic profiles from Likes. The model correctly discriminates between homosexual and heterosexual men in 88% of cases, African Americans and Caucasian Americans in 95% of cases, and between Democrat and Republican in 85% of cases. For the personality trait “Openness,” prediction accuracy is close to the test–retest accuracy of a standard personality test. We give examples of associations between attributes and Likes and discuss implications for online personalization and privacy.

Does pshchodynamic hocus-pocus have the capability to have guessed Amy Winehouse liked booze? I doubt she had any deep history of Facebook usage, Likes or whatever, for CA dissection. Art has no time for measurements or small talk.

Now, profiling song words and demeanor, staging nuances, perhaps that might shine a light on the Winehouse Gestalt. Perhaps CA could infer a likely voting pattern, you think? A Romney Republican, or a Palin one? I bet they'd say a toss-up.

Back to the first quote of the post:

And it could allow politicians to reach groups who have previously been ignored and may not have bothered voting as a result.

The Amy demographic? The trumpet player, CA catching him leaning between Bannon and Kushner, unsure? Perhaps.

Be sure to be paid by the promoter; play your best, and for the politicians, "Say, No, No, No."

UPDATE: Worth pointing out, the title of the paper, "Private traits and attributes are predictable from digital records of human behavior"

FURTHER: Private traits and attributes predictable from the sidebar man with teleprompter? From his digital record?

This guy?

Another? Any profile hint? Differences and similarities; last two, is that something profiling at present is capable of discerning? Last two, vs teleprompter man?

FURTHER: Here and here, without backup musicians. Digital records. Finding the thread among digital records.