Book Review: Targeted
The Cambridge Analytica Whistleblower's Inside Story of How Big Data, Trump, and Facebook Broke Democracy and How It Can Happen Again
The book Targeted by Brittany Kaiser has two compelling central themes. One is a very modern story of how our personal data is used to manipulate us into changing our behavior. The other is a timeless story of a young woman who for reasons of economic (and maybe personal) insecurity, changes her behavior and identity slowly, arriving at a point in time where she doesn’t recognize herself in the mirror. Both stories are equally fascinating, albeit it for different reasons.
One of the most important takeaways from this book is that our very own data is being used against us. Every day on the Internet we give away a piece of ourselves. Every website we visit, every Facebook post we “like,” every retweet gives large tech companies the ability to sell us. Tech companies don't sell advertisements, they sell access to us. We ARE the product.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the case of electioneering. Targeted tells the story of how our own data this used to manipulate us into voting against our own good, or even not voting at all. Sometimes that takes the form of rather innocuous political advertisements. In this case microtargeting is simply a “smart” advertising strategy; why waste money putting ads in front of people whose opinions you know you won’t change? But in a much more worrisome scenario, our own data is used to heighten our fears and to cool our excitement. The company Cambridge Analytica used our own Facebook data (and likely much more) to test different messages, find what worked, and then use it against us. They used “personality quizzes” and similar social media devices to collect vast amounts of data on all of us. They weaponized our hopes, dreams, feelings, and thoughts that we freely shared with the world. And if we're not careful, it will happen again.
Chapter 5 titled “Terms and Conditions” shows the vast amount of data that we all generate which can then be used to manipulate:
Perhaps the most important first thing that made CA different from any other communications firm was the size of our database. The database, Tayler explained, was prodigious and unprecedented in depth and breadth, and was growing ever bigger by the day. We had come about it by buying and licensing all the personal information held on every American citizen. We bought that data from every vendor we could afford to pay dash from Experian to Axiom to Infogroup. We bought data about Americans’ finances, where they bought things, how much they paid for them, where they went on vacation, what they read.
We matched this data to their political information (their voting habits, which were accessible publicly) and then matched all that again to their Facebook data (what topics they had “liked”). From Facebook alone, we had some 570 individual data points on users, and so, combining all this give us some 5,000 data points on every single American over the age of 18 - some 240 million people.
The special edge of the database, though, Tayler said, was our access to Facebook for messaging. We used the Facebook platform to reach the same people on whom we had compiled so much data. (pgs. 77-78)
Chapter 13 titled “Postmortem” exposes the heart of the Trump campaign’s data manipulation story. Cambridge Analytica expended a significant amount of money and effort on trying to understand their targeted audience. The way that they did this was very sophisticated. The team created a real-time dashboard so that political operatives could constantly monitor the effectiveness of their messaging. The author writes:
Contrary to public perception, the campaign strategy was not led by Donald's erratic tweets or the sweepingly vague speeches he made on TV and at rallies. Every little detail was recorded in real time, and the moment an adjustment needed to be made, an ad could be changed to perform better, reaching more people and keeping the content fresh and relevant to the millions of voters it was reaching.
The scope of what the CA team on the Trump campaign was monitoring and juggling is breathtaking even to consider: thousands of individual ad campaigns within campaigns - in other words, separate suites of content aimed again and again at millions of segmented voters in different states , regions, and even neighborhoods, all of which could be adjusted almost in real-time, based on performance. (p. 225)
The story of the author’s descent into this world is also a precautionary tale on a personal level. The author states that she was ultimately looking for a way to make a positive change in the world and help her struggling family. Her interests included human rights, justice, and other liberal causes. The author started her political career volunteering for the Obama campaign. But to the disappointment of her younger self, she ended up pitching the services of Cambridge Analytica to variety of staunchly conservative clients. Her employer played a vital role in the “success” of the Brexit vote in the United Kingdom and the election of Donald Trump in the United States. Along the way many of the individual pieces may not have troubled her too much at the time. But when she stopped to reflect on where she had come from and where she presently was, she did not recognize herself. While it's always important to have an open mind and be willing to engage in debates and conversations, it's psychologically unhealthy to sacrifice our core values for the hope of a payout. This is a lesson the author learned the hard way.