A good analysis and I too am conflicted on CA.
Data mining isn’t illegal and certainly isn’t that difficult (technically). The issue that appears to have crossed a line is with CA’s acquisition of the seed profiles from Facebook that were then used to develop a FOAF ontology (friend of a friend).
The machine learning element of this isn’t that tricky either.
Regular viewers of this site and TSW will remember that I developed some weird NLP (Natural Language Processing) analysis stuff (Wordles, and sentiment analysis) for Saints’ posters about 4 years ago.
In a previous life, I also developed a software tool that would analyse the marketing materials of high-tech software vendors and profile and categorise them as to how they took their products to market.
Managing the large volumes of data isn’t that tricky anymore given developments in Big Data tools.
Our very own Optimus Trousers makes use of most of these techniques to spew (too much - some say) news into our weekly thread.
What Cambridge Analytica did, and should be given huge technical credit for, is the psychographic segmentation. That is really smart stuff.
Understanding how our responses to a few very targeted questions can reveal everything about how we can be influenced is technically very clever.
They developed something that could tap into our hopes and fears and aggressively target those dreams or nightmares to change or influence our political position.
It’s difficult to say this, but I suspect that process isn’t wrong.
Is it?
Isn’t this what political organisations and corporations have tried to do for years through advertising and buying media barons’ backing?
It’s just being done now on a granular level that hasn’t been seen before. CA has taken the incredibly inefficient broadcast political messaging process and given us hyper-efficient, personalised individual messaging designed to influence a single person’s view.
Their crime (allegedly) seems to have been ‘stealing’ the seed data, so whilst I don’t think their business model is illegal, it certainly seems morally questionable.