Data is the most valuable asset in the world.
Brittany Kaiser
If we want protection, we need to start thinking of our data as our property, because, if no one has noticed, property is held up and protected legally.
Our data has been harvested, collected, modeled, and monetized - sometimes sold on as raw data, and sometimes licensed just for advertisers to be able to target us.
Corporations like Google, Facebook, Amazon, all of these large companies, are making tens or hundreds of billions of dollars off of monetising people's data.
In order to create predictive algorithms, you need to have a training set. So, that training set is created through our quantitative surveys. Those surveys need to include either basic market research questions or basic political polling questions, which might be added to get your opinion on a brand or an issue or a candidate.
If you are interacting with anything on your phone or your computer, it is specifically designed to collect as much data about you as possible, so that that can then be monetized.
The use of data for political purposes wasn't invented by Cambridge Analytica. It started when I was on the Obama campaign in 2007-2008. We invented social media strategy.
There's a very low amount of data literacy around people.
Who knows more about the usage of personal data than Cambridge Analytica?
To be honest, it's hard when you're knee-deep in the trenches of an industry to see it how others see it.
Every time you work on a political campaign, half the people hate you. That's how it is.
I wouldn't call myself a commitment-phobe, but someone who really likes to try everything to the point of wanting to do short-term projects, just to give myself the opportunity to go to more places and try more things.
I was like: the narrative should be that the work that we did was never paid for so Leave.E.U., by not registering that we did that work, are the ones that should be in trouble.
I think of myself as intelligent and strong and principled.
Imagine if Facebook's users received a universal basic income every day. This isn't going to be easy because it means that inherently their business model is going to take a little bit of a pay cut.
What if in a permission-based structure, you could decide if you wanted to provide value to advertisers or to political groups? Or, for instance, share your medical data for cancer research? All those options should be available for an individual to make.
I'm so tired of making excuses for old white men.
I was very taken aback and disappointed in Sheryl Sandberg's public statement that if an individual did not want to continue to share their data with FB they would have to pay. To me, that sounds like a threat. Continue to let us use your property or pay?
I hadn't lived in the U.S. for my entire adult life, so a lot of U.S. news agencies, I just had no idea.
I felt like I'd spent many years making excuses for my executives and making excuses for political candidates I was representing and their views, when some of those political views, in my mind, were very distasteful.
The bigger a data set that you have, the more polls, the more surveys that you have that people undertake, the more accurate your models are going to be. That's just a fact of data science.
Ukip had undertaken a survey on why people wanted to leave the E.U. or not, and they also had membership data. So we were able to build personas out of that. That was work that would normally be paid for.
I've always had one completely nonaltruistic goal, which is to go to every country in the world.
Alexander Nix has no interest in the Republicans or Democrats winning or losing.
Individuals should be able to monetise their own data - that's their own human value - not to be exploited.
The use of data for political purposes wasn't invented by Cambridge Analytica.
I'm not a fan of the #DeleteFacebook campaign. I think that they can reform.
Cambridge Analytica never took receipt of any data or undertook any modelling on behalf of Leave.E.U.
The proposal for how we were going to assist the Leave.E.U. campaign was to undertake the same type of research that we were undertaking in the United States.
The biggest companies in the world right now are made up of trillions of dollars of digital assets that really, in my opinion, should belong to us as individuals.
If you're trained as a proper political consultant, you should be able to undertake your profession no matter who the client is.
