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this material would none the less be useful in the hands of someone who wanted to blackmail him or embarrass his family. And that is where we start to stray very far over the creepy line. When private, sensitive information about you, gathered without your knowledge, is then used to manipulate you.
Since the 1980s, psychologists have been using a system of five characteristics to quantify an individual’s personality. You get a score on each of the following traits: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. Collectively, they offer a standard and useful way to describe what kind of a person you are.
the paper they published the following year,
the team built an algorithm that could infer someone’s personality from their Facebook Likes alone.
My likes mainly acknowledge that i have seen the message.
if you could collect 300 Likes from someone’s Facebook profile, the algorithm would be able to judge their character more accurately than their spouse could.
All this work was motivated by how it could be used in advertising.
experimenting with sending out adverts tailored to an individual’s personality traits.
the team served up adverts for a beauty product to extraverts using the slogan ‘Dance like no one’s watching (but they totally are)’, while introverts saw an image of a girl smiling and standing in front of the mirror with the phrase ‘Beauty doesn’t have to shout.’
the team claimed that matching adverts to a person’s character led to 40 per cent more clicks and up to 50 per cent more purchases than using generic, unpersonalized ads.
Every major political party in the Western world uses extensive analysis and micro-targeting of voters.
Cambridge Analytica were also using personality profiles of the electorate to deliver emotionally charged political messages – for example, finding single mothers who score highly on neuroticism and preying on their fear of being attacked in their own home to persuade them into supporting a pro-gun-lobby message.
on top of all that, Cambridge Analytica are accused of creating adverts and dressing them up as journalism. According to one whistleblower’s testimony to the Guardian, one of the most effective ads during the campaign was an interactive graphic titled ‘10 inconvenient truths about the Clinton Foundation’.22 Another whistleblower went further and claimed that the ‘articles’ planted by Cambridge Analytica were often based on demonstrable falsehoods.23
the posts we see on Facebook have the power to alter our emotions.
even with the best, most deviously micro-profiled campaigns, only a small amount of influence will leak through to the target. And yet, potentially, in an election those tiny slivers of influence might be all you need to swing the balance.
Free technology in return for your data and the ability to use it to influence and profit from you.
Sesame Credit, a citizen scoring system used by the Chinese government.
GDPR – General Data Protection Regulation
revellers
the judge said his actions had contributed to the atmosphere of lawlessness in Brixton that night.
The judicial system knows it’s not perfect, but it doesn’t try to be.
Judging guilt and assigning punishment isn’t an exact science, and there’s no way a judge can guarantee precision. That’s why phrases such as ‘reasonable doubt’ and ‘substantial grounds’ are so fundamental to the legal vocabulary, and why appeals are such an important part of the process; the system accepts that absolute certainty is unachievable.
Numerous other studies have come to the same conclusion: whenever judges have the freedom to assess cases for themselves, there will be massive inconsistencies. Allowing judges room for discretion means allowing there to be an element of luck in the system.
However you set up the system for your judges, you have to find a tricky balance between offering individualized justice and ensuring consistency.
Across the Western world, sentencing guidelines tend to lay down a maximum sentence (as in Ireland) or a minimum sentence (as in Canada) or both (as in England and Wales),15 and allow judges latitude to adjust the sentence up or down between those limits.
with an algorithm as part of the process, both consistency and individualized justice can be guaranteed. No one needs to choose between them.
an algorithm can do, however, incredible as it might seem, is use data on an individual to calculate their risk of re-offending.
Ernest W. Burgess, a Canadian sociologist at the University of Chicago with a thirst for prediction.
recidivism
the state-of-the-art risk-assessment algorithms used by courtrooms
random forests,
as long as they fit the pattern of everyone who has gone before, the prediction will be right.
In general, when we customize solutions, we are applying what we have learned from presumably similar individuals.
The errors made by many can cancel each other out and result in a crowd that’s wiser than the individual.
With many exceptions of course. What if the individual was the best in the group in the desired context?
Random forests have proved themselves to be incredibly useful in a whole host of real-world applications. They’re used by Netflix to help predict what you’d like to watch based on past preferences;22 by Airbnb to detect fraudulent accounts;23 and in healthcare for disease diagnosis
in the United States spending a year in a high-security prison can cost about the same as going to Harvard27
no algorithm can perfectly predict what a person is going to do in the future. Individual humans are too messy, irrational and impulsive for a forecast
How do you persuade people to apply a healthy dose of common sense when it comes to using these algorithms?
the ProPublica study doesn’t make things look good for the algorithm.
Marijuana use, for instance, happens in blacks and whites at the same rate, and yet arrest rates in African Americans can be up to eight times higher.
the calls are getting louder for an algorithmic regulating body to control the industry.
it would test accuracy, consistency and bias behind closed doors and have the authority to approve or deny the use of a product on real people.
quirk
Weber’s Law states that the smallest change in a stimulus that can be perceived, the so-called ‘Just Noticeable Difference’, is proportional to the initial stimulus.
exploited by marketers. They know exactly how much they can get away with shrinking a chocolate bar before customers notice, or precisely how much they can nudge up the price of an item before you’ll think it’s worth shopping around.
our perceptions of strangers change depending on the temperature of a drink we’re holding. If you’re handed a warm drink just before meeting a new person, they suggest, you’re more likely to see them as having a warmer, more generous, more caring personality.
‘Even knowing that the human judge might make more errors, the offenders still prefer a human to an algorithm. They want that human touch.’
an algorithm – even an imperfect algorithm – working with judges to support their often faulty cognition is, I think, a step in the right direction. At least a well-designed and properly regulated algorithm can help get rid of systematic bias and random error.
‘parole’ comes from the French parole, meaning ‘voice, spoken words’. It originated in its current form in the 1700s, when prisoners would be released if they gave their word that they would not return to crime:
if a pigeon can manage it, why not an algorithm?
This is an example of true demagoguery. Who knows why the pigeons were deciding that way. This logic does not justify anything.
Before then, medicine had been – for the most part – barely distinguishable from magic. People believed that you fell ill if you’d displeased some god or other, and that disease was the result of an evil spirit possessing your body. As a result, the work of a physician would involve a lot of chanting and singing and superstition, which sounds like a lot of fun, but probably not for the person who was relying on it all to stop them from dying.
Hippocrates
