Political parties ‘bumbling rubes’ on data: CPC campaign chair

OTTAWA — The head of the Conservative Party’s 2019 national election campaign says it’s not worth getting “overly concerned” about manipulative techniques used by Cambridge Analytica after its political data harvesting controversy, because they didn’t work. Hamish Marshall, the national campaign manager of the Conservative Party's 2019 election campaign, said when he looked at the details of how the company tried to operate, he found its ability to predict voter intent wasn’t very good — not much better than random chance. “We shouldn't get overly concerned about something that's not especially effective,” he said at a panel debate event on data and elections, hosted by thePANEL in Ottawa Monday night — although added the company should of course be punished for misusing user data and breaking laws. “They spent a huge amount of money and they found out their ability to predict whether or not someone was likely to vote for one party or another or one candidate or another was about eight per cent better than random.” The company had allegedly used psychological profiles of voters to send them targeted ads based on their personalities. Marshall was responding to a question by moderator Mercedes Stephenson, Global News’ Ottawa bureau chief, about whether parties buying or obtaining data has been good or bad for democracy. He said in general that’s been a good development because it takes power away from political elites and gives more power to voters. Marshall said while the Cambridge Analytica incident attracted a lot of attention to political campaigns, parties themselves are far behind the corporate sector in data analysis and marketing. “The funny thing about all the attention on political parties is we’re really kind of the bumbling rubes in the room,” he said. “Political parties actually aren’t very good at this. The people who are really good at it are large corporations who’ve got a much bigger ongoing relationship with their customers.” But an expert in global security and politics on the panel with Marshall argued the Cambridge Analytica data harvesting scandal is just the "tip of the iceberg," and Canada has yet to have a sufficient debate about its online privacy laws. Carleton University professor Fen Osler Hampson, a director at the Centre for International Governance Innovation, said the Cambridge Analytica debacle is a sign of things to come: artificial intelligence and political manipulation of data. "What we saw in Cambridge Analytica was just the beginning, not the end, where by various surreptitious means a company that had access to Facebook data was selling it to political parties," he told a panel audience Monday evening, warning that parties and governments will be able to use data on a “much more sophisticated scale” in just a few years from now, and tailor policies to micro-target groups. He pointed to the recent controversy over Statistics Canada collecting financial data, where Canadians “started getting nervous,” as an example. “Imagine … if the Liberal Party starts getting really sophisticated in how they manipulate that data when it comes to election season –- or the Conservative Party or New Democratic Party –- and what rules do we have in place when it comes to your data and your privacy?” He said Canada is lagging on online privacy laws, pointing to the EU’s General Data Protection Regulations, and added he wants the next Parliament to take up online privacy a “serious way." But he also said the government is showing signs it’s beginning to take mitigating cyber hacking seriously, pointing to the G7 summit in Charlevoix, Quebec this summer where countries agreed to create a rapid-reaction capability for member countries to share information about cyber attacks -– a problem that transcends national borders. The panel debate lands amid larger questions over whether political parties should be brought under private sector privacy laws just a year away from the next federal election. The House of Commons ethics committee this week began drafting its report on the Facebook Inc. data breach by Cambridge Analytica, where the company had improperly accessed millions of users’ data for political purposes. Meanwhile, the committee’s chair called again Monday for Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to testify at an international grand committee meeting on disinformation and ‘fake news’, and face representatives from eight countries at a meeting at the end of the month. Conservative MP Bob Zimmer said in a press release that because Facebook has said Zuckerberg cannot travel to London, he should instead appear by video in order to "show our countries and the citizens we represent the respect that we deserve and finally accept our request to appear before our committee." – With reporting by Kyle Duggan at kduggan@thewirereport.ca and editing by Anja Karadeglija at akarad@thewirereport.ca.

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Political parties ‘bumbling rubes’ on data: CPC campaign chair

News | November 20, 2018

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