Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America

by Christopher Wylie

We also got access to census data. Unlike developing nations with less stringent privacy controls, the U.S. government won’t provide raw data on specific individuals, but you can get information, down to the county or neighborhood level, on crime, obesity, and illnesses such as diabetes and asthma. A census block typically contains six hundred to three thousand people, which means that by combining many sources of data, we could build models that infer those attributes about individuals. For example, by referencing risk or protective factors for diabetes, such as age, race, location, income, interest in health food, restaurant preference, gym membership, and past use of weight-loss products (all of which are available in most U.S. consumer files), we could match that data against aggregated statistics about a locality’s diabetes rates. We could then create a score for each person in a given neighborhood measuring the likelihood that they had a health issue like diabetes—even if the census or consumer file never directly provided that data on its own.