March 28, 2018 02:11 PM UTC

Sorry Colorado Voters, Your Stolen Data Is Still Out There

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• by: Colorado Pols

The UK’s Channel 4 News–not our local Channel 4, mind you–breaks more disturbing news for Coloradans about the use of improperly obtained social media usage data by Republicans to “microtarget” voters here in the 2014 elections. Despite the claims by embattled “psychoanalytics” firm Cambridge Analytica that all such data had been deleted, reporters from England have been knocking on doors in Arvada to explain to local voters that no, sorry…

The cache of campaign data from a Cambridge Analytica source, details 136,000 individuals in the US state of Colorado, along with each person’s personality and psychological profile.

The data, which dates from 2014, was used by Cambridge Analytica to target specific messages at residents who would be most susceptible to them.

As the harvesting scandal grew last week, Cambridge Analytica insisted all Facebook data it held, and any information they had derived using the Facebook data, “had been deleted”.

Facebook also said it took steps to ensure all information related to harvested profiles was “destroyed”.

But the Colorado dataset, along with similar data for Oregon, suggests copies of the Facebook-derived data still exists, and raises questions about who still has them.

Interviews with Colorado voters with a psychoanalytic profile in Cambridge Analytica’s dataset seem to poke holes in the idea that it was some kind of omniscient predictor of human behavior. At least in terms of self-identification, voters interviewed for this story found significant discrepancies from their profiled selves.

On the other hand, who wants to cop to a high level of “neuroticism?”

The real problem here is that the data used to construct these profiles of American voters was improperly obtained without the consent of the Facebook users it was gleaned from. That problem is further compounded by the fact that the data has not been deleted despite the insistence of Cambridge Analytica that it had been. For all Colorado voters know, data we thought was confidential–and then we were told was deleted–is still being used to manipulate our behavior.

Safe to say, the Republicans who brought this chicanery down on Colorado have a lot to answer for.