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I think this is a good thread. My take is that psychological microtargeting is very unlikely to have influenced Trump's election. But that doesn't mean it won't get more sophisticated: it could influence future elections. So we need to decide what we want to do about it. 1/
And this isn't just about Facebook. Lots of digital footprints can be used to predict psychology. IBM has a personality insights API which works with text data, such as Tweets ibm.com/watson/service… 2/
Plenty of advertisers collect cookie data, which follows us around the Internet recording all of the websites we visit. I'm sure that knowing what websites a person visits can be used to predict their psychology. 3/
Google/YouTube knows what we search for and what videos we watch. Apple knows what music we listen to. Our cellphone provider knows where we go and who we call. Store loyalty cards know what we buy. All can be used to predict psychology and then do microtargeting. 4/
And it's not even just about politics. If a credit card company uses data to predict I'm a risk taker and then doesn't advertise a credit card to me (or advertises one with a high interest rate) - that has a big impact on my life and I'm probably not even aware of it. 5/
So: How do we want companies to use our data? How do we want companies to advertise to us? What rights should we have? I am looking forwards to EU's GDPR: some of the rights around automated profiling should give us more transparency. But USA doesn't seem to be doing anything. 6/
My view is that all advertising should be put in a public repository. If you pay to send a message, that ad should be made public. When an ad can be sent to a group of 10 people and no one else will ever see it, it's too easy to lie and manipulate. We must be able to regulate 7/7
