Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy

by Cathy O'Neil

But even television is moving toward personalized advertising. New advertising companies like Simulmedia, in New York, assemble TV viewers into behavioral buckets, so that advertisers can target audiences of like-minded people, whether hunters, pacifists, or buyers of tank-sized SUVs. As television and the rest of the media move toward profiling their viewers, the potential for political microtargeting grows. As this happens, it will become harder to access the political messages our neighbors are seeing—and as a result, to understand why they believe what they do, often passionately. Even a nosy journalist will struggle to track down the messaging. It is not enough simply to visit the candidate’s web page, because they, too, automatically profile and target each visitor, weighing everything from their zip codes to the links they click on the page, even the photos they appear to look at. It’s also fruitless to create dozens of “fake” profiles, because the systems associate each real voter with deep accumulated knowledge, including purchasing records, addresses, phone numbers, voting records, and even social security numbers and Facebook profiles. To convince the system it’s real, each fake would have to come with its own load of data. Fabricating one would require far too much work for a research project (and in the worst-case scenario it might get the investigator tangled up in fraud).