Punk in Finland

Trump Knows You Better Than You Know Yourself
Posted on 22/01/2017 by Ed Sutton in Fear & Hate, Hearts & Minds, Revelations and tagged Das Magazin, Hannes Grassegger, Mikael Krogerus, Propaganda.



Trump Knows You Better Than You Know Yourself
Psychometrics and the (counter)revolution in marketing that is helping bring fascism to power around the world

AntiNote: The following is an unauthorized translation of a December 2016 article that caused quite a stir in the German-language press. Das Magazin (Zurich) occupies a respected position within the German-language cultural and literary media landscape, functionally similar to (though perhaps not quite as prominent as) The New Yorker, and this work by investigative reporters Hannes Grassegger and Mikael Krogerus got a lot of attention—and generated some controversy, for apparently having scooped the English-language media with sensational observations about 2016’s most sensational story, the campaign and electoral victory of a fascist dictator in the United States.

Perhaps for this reason, the article has not appeared in translation in (or even had its investigative threads taken up by) English-language media outlets, even after nearly two months. Antidote presents, therefore, our own preemptive translation to fill this gap. We trust the skill of the reporters who wrote it and the veracity of their claims (which are verifiable by anyone with a search engine—we have embedded links where appropriate), and we question why this particular synthesis of public information is not being made available to non-German-speaking readers by outlets with more reach and respectability than us dirty DIY dicks.

On the occasion of this article’s authorized wider release in English, should that come to pass, we will consider removing this post if we are asked nicely. Until then: Enjoy!

[26 January 2017: There seems to have been a revised English version by Das Magazin circulating privately, which the Antidote Writers Collective was able to obtain. It corrects some minor flaws in the original German version, which we have now corrected here as well, along with replacing some short passages with their more precise wording. We have also added a few further links to supporting documentation. The basic thrust and thesis of the article remain unaltered.]

“I just showed that the bomb was there.”

By Hannes Grassegger and Mikael Krogerus for Das Magazin (Zurich)
3 December 2016 (original post)

Psychologist Michal Kosinski developed a method of analyzing people’s behavior down to the minutest detail by looking at their Facebook activity—did a similar tool help propel Donald Trump to victory?

On November 9th, around 8:30 in the morning, Michal Kosinski awoke in his hotel room in Zurich. The 34-year-old had traveled here to give a presentation to the Risk Center at the ETH [Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule or Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich] at a conference on the dangers of Big Data and the so-called digital revolution. Kosinski gives such presentations all over the world. He is a leading expert on psychometrics, a data-driven offshoot of psychology. Turning on the television that morning in Zurich, he saw that the bomb had gone off: defying the predictions of nearly every leading statistician, Donald J. Trump had been elected president of the United States of America.

Kosinski watched Trump’s victory celebration and the remaining election returns for a long while. He suspected that his research could have had something to do with the result. Then he took a deep breath and turned off the television.

On the same day, a little-known British company headquartered in London issued a press release: “We are thrilled that our revolutionary approach to data-driven communications played such an integral part in president-elect Donald Trump’s extraordinary win,” Alexander James Ashburner Nix is quoted as saying. Nix is British, 41 years old, and CEO of Cambridge Analytica. He is always immaculately turned out in a tailored suit and designer eyeglasses, his slightly wavy blond hair combed back.

The meditative Kosinski, the well-groomed Nix, the widely grinning Trump—one made this digital upheaval possible, one carried it out, and one rode it to power.

How dangerous is Big Data?

Anyone who didn’t spend the last five years on the moon has heard the term Big Data. The emergence of Big Data has meant that everything we do, online or off-, leaves digital traces. Every purchase with a card, every Google search, every movement with a cellphone in your pocket, every “like” gets stored. Especially every “like.” For a while it wasn’t entirely clear what any of this data would be good for, other than showing us ads for blood pressure medication after we google “high blood pressure.” It also wasn’t entirely clear whether or in what ways Big Data would be a threat or a boon to humanity.

Since November 9th, 2016, we know the answer. Because one and the same company was behind both Trump’s online ad campaigns and mid-2016’s other shocker, the Brexit “Leave” campaign: Cambridge Analytica, with its CEO Alexander Nix. Anyone who wants to understand the outcome of the US elections—and what could be coming up in Europe in the near future—must begin with a remarkable incident at the University of Cambridge in 2014, at Kosinski’s Psychometrics Center.

Psychometrics, sometimes also known as psychography, is a scientific attempt to “measure” the personality of a person. The so-called Ocean Method has become the standard approach. Two teams of psychologists were able to demonstrate in the 1980s that the character profile of a person can be measured and expressed in five dimensions, the Big Five: Openness (how open are you to new experiences?), Conscientiousness (how much of a perfectionist are you?), Extroversion (how sociable are you?), Agreeableness (how considerate and cooperative are you?), and Neuroticism (how sensitive/vulnerable are you?). With these five dimensions (O.C.E.A.N.), you can determine fairy precisely what kind of person you are dealing with—their needs and fears as well as how they are likely to behave. For a long time, however, the problem was data collection, because to produce such a character profile meant asking subjects to fill out a complicated survey asking quite personal questions. Then came the internet. And Facebook. And Kosinski.

Michal Kosinski was a student in Warsaw when his life took a new direction in 2008: he was accepted to the prestigious University of Cambridge in England to do doctoral work at the Psychometrics Center, one of the oldest institutions of its kind worldwide. Kosinski joined fellow student David Stillwell (now a lecturer at Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge) about a year after Stillwell had launched a little Facebook application, in the days when the platform had not yet become the behemoth it is today. With MyPersonality, a user could fill out psychometric questionnaires, including a handful of questions from the Ocean survey (“I panic easily” – “I contradict others”), and receive a rating, or a “Personality Profile” consisting of individual Big Five values—and, when prompted, opt-in to share their Facebook profile data with the researchers. Instead of a couple dozen college friends participating, as Kosinski had expected, first hundreds, then thousands, then millions of people had bared their souls. Suddenly the two doctoral students had access to the then-largest psychological data set ever produced.

The process that Kosinski and his colleagues developed over the years that followed is actually quite simple. First surveys are distributed to test subjects—this is the online quiz. From the subjects’ responses, their personal Big Five scores are calculated. Then Kosinski’s team would compare these results to all sorts of other online data about test subjects—what they’ve liked, shared, or posted on Facebook; gender, age, and location. Thus the researchers began to find correlations, and began to see that amazingly reliable deductions could be made about a person by observing their online behavior. For example, men who “liked” the cosmetics brand MAC were more likely to be gay. One of the best indicators of heterosexuality was liking Wu-Tang Clan. People who followed Lady Gaga, furthermore, tended to be extroverts. Someone who likes philosophy is more likely introverted. While each piece of such information is too weak to produce a reliable prediction, when tens, hundreds, or thousands of individual data points are combined, the resulting predictions become really accurate.

Kosinski and his team continued, tirelessly refining their models. In 2012, Kosinski demonstrated that from a mere 68 Facebook likes on average, a lot about a user could be reliably predicted: skin color (95% accuracy), sexual orientation (88% accuracy), Democrat or Republican (85%). But there’s more: level of intellect; religious affiliation; alcohol-, cigarette-, and drug abuse could all be calculated. Even whether or not your parents were divorced could be teased out of the data.

The strength of the model depended on how well it could predict a test subject’s answers. Kosinski kept working at it. Soon, with a mere ten “likes” as input his model could appraise a person’s character better than an average coworker. With seventy, it could “know” a subject better than a friend; with 150 likes, better than their parents. With 300 likes, Kosinski’s model could predict a subject’s answers better than their partner. With even more likes it could exceed what a person thinks they know about themselves.

The day he published these findings, Kosinski received two phonecalls. One was a threat to sue, the other a job offer. Both were from Facebook.

Only Visible to Friends

Just weeks later, Facebook likes became private by default (until then, the default setting had been that anyone on the internet could see your likes). This is still no obstacle for data-collectors: while Kosinski always requests the consent of the Facebook users he tests, many apps and online quizzes demand access to private information as a precondition to taking a personality test. (Anyone who is not overly concerned about their private information and wants to get assessed according to their Facebook likes can do so at Kosinski’s website, and then compare the results to those of a “classic” Ocean survey here.)

But it’s not just about likes. Kosinski and his team figured out how to ascribe Big Five values based only on how many profile pictures or how many social media contacts a person has (this is a good indicator of extroversion). And it’s not even just about Facebook. We also betray information about ourselves when we are offline. Motion sensors in a smartphone can show, for example, how fast we move it and how far we are traveling (correlates with emotional instability). A smartphone, Kosinski found, is in itself a powerful psychological survey that we, consciously or unconsciously, are constantly filling out.

Above all, though—and this is important to understand—it also works another way: using all this data, psychological profiles can not only be constructed, but they can also be sought and found. For example if you’re looking for worried fathers, or angry introverts, or undecided Democrats. What Kosinski had invented was essentially a search engine for people. He has been getting more and more acutely aware of both the potential and the danger his work presents.

The internet always seemed to him a gift from heaven. What he really wanted was to give something back, to share. Data can be copied, so why shouldn’t everyone benefit from it? It was the spirit of an entire generation, the beginning of a new era free of the limits of the physical world. But what could happen, Kosinski asked himself, if someone misused his search engine in order to manipulate people? He began to add warnings to most of his scientific work [e.g.]: these prediction techniques, he warned, could be used in ways that “pose a threat to an individual’s well-being, freedom, or even life.” But no one seemed to understand what he meant.

Around this time, in early 2014, a young assistant professor named Aleksandr Kogan approached Kosinski. He said he had received an inquiry from a company interested in Kosinski’s methods. They apparently wanted to access the MyPersonality database, Kosinski remembers. To what purpose, Kogan couldn’t say: there were strict secrecy stipulations. At first, Kosinski and his team considered the offer—it would have meant a lot of money for his institute. But he hesitated. Finally, Kosinski remembers, Kogan divulged the name of the company: SCL, Strategic Communications Laboratories. Kosinski googled them [so did Antidote. Here. —ed.]: “[We are] a global election management agency,” said the company website [really, the website has even creepier language on it than that. “Behavioral change communication”? Go look already. —ed.]. SCL offers marketing based on a “psychographic targeting” model. With an emphasis on “election management” and political campaigns? Disturbed, Kosinski clicked through the pages. What kind of company is this? And what do they have planned for the United States?

What Kosinski didn’t know at the time: SCL is the public front of a complex group of companies whose byzantine corporate structures make it unclear who owns it and its diverse branches—as can be seen in the UK Companies House, the Panama Papers, and the Delaware company registry. Some SCL offshoots have been involved in overthrowing governments in developing countries; others have done work developing methods for psychologically manipulating the population in Afghanistan for NATO. SCL is also the parent company of Cambridge Analytica, this ominous Big Data outfit that later managed online marketing for both Trump and the Brexit “Leave” campaign.

Kosinski didn’t know any of that, but he had a bad feeling: “The whole thing started to stink,” he recalls. Looking into it further, he discovered that Aleksandr Kogan had secretly registered a company doing business with SCL. Documents obtained by Das Magazin confirm that SCL learned about Kosinski’s methods through Kogan, as was also revealed by the Guardian in December 2015. It suddenly dawned on Kosinski that Kogan could have reconstructed (or copied?) his Facebook likes-based Big Five measurement tool in order to sell it to this election-manipulating company. He immediately broke off contact with him and informed the head of the institute. A complicated battle ensued within Cambridge University. The institute feared for its reputation. Aleksandr Kogan moved to Singapore, got married, and began calling himself Dr. Spectre. Michal Kosinski finished his doctorate, got a job offer from Stanford University, and moved to the United States.

For a year or so it was quiet. Then, in November 2015, the more radical of the two Brexit campaigns (leave.eu, supported by Nigel Farage) announced that they had contracted with a Big Data firm for online marketing support: Cambridge Analytica. The core expertise of this company: innovative political marketing, so-called microtargeting, by measuring people’s personality from their digital footprints based on the Ocean model.

Kosinski started getting emails asking if he had had anything to do with it—for many, his is the first name to spring to mind upon hearing the terms Cambridge, Ocean, and analytics in the same breath. This is when he heard of Cambridge Analytica for the first time. Appalled, he looked up their website. Were his methods being deployed, on a massive scale, for political purposes?

After the Brexit vote in July the email inquiries turned to insults and reproaches. Just look what you’ve done, friends and colleagues wrote. Kosinski had to explain over and over again that he had nothing to do with this company.

First Brexit, Then Trump

September 19th, 2016: the US presidential election is approaching. Guitar riffs fill the dark blue ballroom of the Grand Hyatt Hotel in New York: CCR’s “Bad Moon Rising.” The Concordia Summit is like the WEF in miniature. Decision makers from all over the world are invited; among the guests is Swiss president Johann Schneider-Ammann.

A gentle women’s voice comes over the PA: “Please welcome Alexander Nix, Chief Executive Officer of Cambridge Analytica.” A lean man in a dark suit strides towards the center of the stage. A attentive quiet descends. Many in the room already know: this is Trump’s new Digital Man. “Soon you’ll be calling me Mr. Brexit,” Trump had tweeted cryptically a few weeks before. Political observers had already been pointing out the substantial similarities between Trump’s agenda and that of the rightwing Brexit camp; only a few had noticed the connection to Trump’s recent hiring of a largely unknown marketing company: Cambridge Analytica.

Before then, Trump’s online campaign had consisted more or less of one person: Brad Parscale, a marketing operative and failed startup founder who had built Trump a rudimentary website for $1,500. The 70-year-old Trump is not what one would call an IT-whiz; his desk is unencumbered by a computer. Trump doesn’t do email, his personal assistant once let slip. It was she who persuaded him to get a smartphone—the one from which he has uninhibitedly tweeted ever since.

Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, was relying on the endowment of the first social media president, Barack Obama. She had the Democratic Party’s address lists, worked with cutting-edge Big Data analysts from BlueLabs, and received support from Google and Dreamworks. When it was announced in June 2016 that Trump had hired Cambridge Analytica, Washington collectively sneered. Foreign noodlenecks in tailored suits who don’t understand this country and its people? Seriously?

“Ladies and gentlemen, honorable colleagues, it is my privilege to speak to you today about the power of Big Data and psychographics in the electoral process.” The Cambridge Analytica logo appears behind Alexander Nix—a brain, comprised of a few network nodes and pathways, like a subway map. “It’s easy to forget that only eighteen months ago Senator Cruz was one of the less popular candidates seeking nomination, and certainly one of the more vilified,” begins the blond man with his British diction that produces the same mixture of awe and resentment in Americans that high German does the Swiss. “In addition, he had very low name recognition; only about forty percent of the electorate had heard of him.”

Everyone in the room was aware of the sudden rise, in May 2016, of the conservative senator. It was one of the strangest moments of the primary campaign. Cruz had become the last serious challenger to frontrunner Trump in the Republican field of presidential candidates, rising from 5 to 35 percent. “How did he do this?” continues Nix.

Cambridge Analytica had begun engaging with US elections towards the end of 2014, initially to advise Ted Cruz, funded by the secretive American tech billionaire Robert Mercer. Up to that point, according to Nix, election campaign strategy had been guided by demographic concepts. “But this is a really ridiculous idea, the idea that all women should receive the same message because of their gender; or all African-Americans because of their race.” The Hillary Clinton campaign team was still operating on precisely such amateurish assumptions—Nix need not even mention—which divide the electorate up into ostensibly homogeneous groups…exactly the same way as all the public opinion researchers who predicted a Clinton victory did.

Nix clicks to the next slide: five different faces, each representing a personality profile. It is the Ocean model. “At Cambridge, we’ve rolled out a long-form quantitative instrument to probe the underlying traits that inform personality. This is the cutting edge in experimental psychology.” It is now completely silent in the hall. “By having hundreds and hundreds of thousands of Americans undertake this survey, we were able to form a model to predict the personality of every single adult in the United States of America.” The success of Cambridge Analytica’s marketing arises from the combination of three elements: this psychological behavioral analysis of the Ocean model, Big Data evaluation, and ad targeting. Ad targeting is personalized advertisement tailored as precisely as possible to the character of a single consumer.

Nix explains forthrightly how his company does this (the presentation can be viewed on YouTube). From a range of different sources, Cambridge Analytical buys up personal data: “What car you drive, what products you purchase in shops, what magazines you read, what clubs you belong to.” Land registry and church membership. On the screen behind him are displayed the logos of global data brokers like Acxiom and Experian—in the United States nearly all personal consumer data is available for purchase. If you want to know, for example, where Jewish women live, you can simply buy this information. Including telephone numbers. Now Cambridge Analytica crosschecks these data sets with Republican Party voter rolls and online data such as Facebook likes, and constructs an Ocean personality profile. From a selection of digital signatures there suddenly emerge real individual people with fears, needs, and interests—and home addresses.

The methodology looks quite similar to the models that Michal Kosinski once developed. Cambridge Analytica also uses surveys on social media in order to gain access to the powerful predictive personal information wrapped up in the Facebook likes of users. And Cambridge Analytica is doing precisely what Kosinski had warned about. “We have profiled the personality of every adult in the United States of America—220 million people,” Nix boasted in an interview with Das Magazin. And all the evidence suggests that they deployed this powerful data set politically.

Back in the ballroom of the Hyatt, Nix clicks to the next slide. “This is a data dashboard that we prepared for the Cruz campaign for the Iowa caucus. It looks intimidating, but it’s actually very simple.” On the left, graphs and diagrams; on the right, a map of Iowa, where Cruz had done surprisingly well in the caucuses. On this map, hundreds of thousands of tiny dots, red and blue. Nix begins to narrow down search criteria to a category of Republican caucus-goers he describes as a “persuasion” group, whose common Ocean personality profile and home locations are now visible, a smaller set of people to whom advertisement can be more effectively tailored. Ultimately the criteria can be narrowed to a single individual, along with his name, age, address, interests, and political leanings. How does Cambridge Analytica approach this person with political messaging?

Earlier in the presentation, using the example of the Second Amendment, Nix showed two variations on how certain psychographic profiles are spoken to differently. “For a highly Neurotic and Conscientious audience, you’re going to need a message that is both rational and fear-based: the threat of a burglary and the ‘insurance policy’ of a gun is very persuasive.” A picture on the left side of the screen shows a gloved hand breaking a window and reaching for the inside door handle. On the right side, there is a picture of a man and child silhouetted against a sunset in tall grass, both with rifles, obviously duck hunting: “for a Closed and Agreeable audience, people who care about traditions and habits and family and community, talking about these values is going to be much more effective in communicating your message.”

How to Keep Clinton Voters Away

Trump’s conspicuous contradictions and his oft-criticized habit of staking out multiple positions on a single issue result in a gigantic number of resulting messaging options that creates a huge advantage for a firm like Cambridge Analytica: for every voter, a different message. Mathematician Cathy O’Neil had already observed in August that “Trump is like a machine learning algorithm” that adjusts to public reactions. “Pretty much every message that Trump put out was data-driven,” Alexander Nix explained to Das Magazin. On the day of the third presidential debate between Trump and Clinton, Trump’s team blasted out 175,000 distinct test variations on his arguments, mostly via Facebook. The messages varied mostly in their microscopic details, in order to communicate optimally with their recipients: different titles, colors, subtitles, with different images or videos. The granularity of this message tailoring digs all the way down to tiny target groups, Nix told Das Magazin. “We can target specific towns or apartment buildings. Even individual people.”

In the Miami neighborhood of Little Haiti, Trump’s campaign regaled residents with messages about the failures of the Clinton Foundation after the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, in order to dissuade them from turning out for Clinton. This was one of the goals: to get potential but wavering Clinton voters—skeptical leftists, African-Americans, young women—to stay home. To “suppress” their votes, as one Trump campaign staffer bluntly put it. In these so-called dark posts (paid Facebook ads which appear in the timelines only of users with a particular suitable personality profile), African-Americans, for example, were shown the nineties-era video of Hillary Clinton referring to black youth as “super predators.”

Nix begins to wrap up his presentation at the Concordia Summit: “Blanket advertising—the idea that a hundred million people will receive the same piece of direct mail, the same television advert, the same digital advert—is dead. My children will certainly never understand this concept of mass communication. Today, communication is becoming ever increasingly targeted.

“The Cruz campaign is over now, but what I can tell you is that of the two candidates left in this election, one of them is using these technologies. And it’s going to be very interesting to see how they impact the next seven weeks. Thank you.” With that, he exits the stage.

It is not knowable just to what extent the American population is being targeted by Trump’s digital troopers—because they seldom attack through the mainstream broadcast media, but rather mostly with highly personalized ads on social media or through digital cable. And while the Clinton team sat back in the confidence that it was safe with its demographic calculations, a new crew was moving into the Trump online campaign headquarters in San Antonio, Texas, as Bloomberg journalist Sasha Issenberg noted with surprise after a visit. The Cambridge Analytica team, apparently just a dozen people, had received around $100,000 from Trump in July; in August another $250,000; five million in September. Altogether, says Nix, they took in around fifteen million.

And the company took even more radical measures: starting in July 2016, a new app was prepared for Trump campaign canvassers with which they could find out the political orientation and personality profile of a particular house’s residents in advance. If the Trump people ring a doorbell, it’s only the doorbell of someone the app has identified as receptive to his messages, and the canvassers can base their line of attack on personality-specific conversation guides also provided by the app. Then they enter a subject’s reactions to certain messaging back into the app, from where this new data flows back to the dashboards of the Trump campaign.

This is nothing new. The Clinton campaign did similar things—but as far as we know they did not use psychometric profiling. Cambridge Analytica, however, divided the US population into 32 personality types, and concentrated on only seventeen states. And just as Kosinski had determined that men who like MAC cosmetics on Facebook are more likely to be gay, Cambridge Analytica found that a preference for American-produced cars is a great indicator of a possible Trump voter. Among other things, this kind of knowledge could inform Trump himself which messages to use, and where. The decision to focus candidate visits in Michigan and Wisconsin over the final weeks of the campaign was based on this manner of data analysis. The candidate himself became an implementation instrument of the model.

What is Cambridge Analytica Doing in Europe?

But to what extent did psychometric methods influence the outcome of the election? Cambridge Analytica, when asked, did not want to disclose any documentation assessing the effectiveness of their campaign. It is possible that the question of how important psychometric targeting was in the 2016 election cannot be answered at all. Still, some indicators should be considered: there is the fact that Ted Cruz, thanks to the help of Cambridge Analytica, rose out of obscurity to become Trump’s strongest competitor in the primaries; there is the increase in rural voter turnout; there is the reduction, compared to 2008 and 2012, in African-American voter participation. The fact that Trump spent so little money may also be explained by the effectiveness of personality-based advertising. As does the fact that he invested far more in digital than TV campaigning compared to Hillary Clinton. Facebook proved to be his ultimate weapon and his best election campaigner, as the tweeting of several Trump staffers describes it. In Germany, the rightwing upstart party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) may like the sound of this, as they have more Facebook friends than Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU) and the Social Democrats (SPD) combined.

It is therefore not at all the case, as is so often claimed, that statisticians lost this election because their polls were so faulty. The opposite is true: statisticians won this election. It was just certain statisticians, the ones using the new method. It is a cruel irony of history that Trump, who often grumbled about scientific research, used such a highly scientific approach in his campaign.

Another big winner in the election was Cambridge Analytica. Steve Bannon, a Cambridge Analytica board member and former executive chair of the ultra-rightwing online site Breitbart News, was named Trump’s chief strategist. Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, ambitious Front National activist and niece of the presidential candidate, has tweeted that she would accept his invitation to collaborate. In an internal company video, there is a recording of a discussion entitled “Italy.” While Cambridge Analytica is not willing to comment on alleged ongoing talks with UK prime minister Theresa May, Alexander Nix claims that he is in the process of client acquisition, worldwide, and that he has received inquiries out of Switzerland and Germany.

Kosinski has been observing all of this from his office at Stanford. After the election, the university has been in turmoil. Kosinski is responding to the developments with the most powerful weapon available to a researcher: scientific analysis. Along with his research colleague Sandra Matz, he conducted a series of tests that will soon be published. The initial results seen by Das Magazin are unsettling: The study shows the effectiveness of personality targeting by showing that marketers can attract up to 63% more clicks and up to 1400% more conversions in real-life advertising campaigns on Facebook when matching products and marketing messages to consumers’ personality characteristics. They further demonstrate the scalability of personality targeting by showing that the majority of Facebook Pages promoting products or brands are affected by personality and that large numbers of consumers can be accurately targeted based on a single Facebook Page.

The world has been turned upside down. The Brits are leaving the EU; Trump rules America. And in Stanford the Polish researcher Michal Kosinski, who indeed tried to warn of the danger of using psychological targeting in a political setting, is still getting accusatory emails. “No,” says Kosinski quietly, shaking his head, “this is not my fault. I did not build the bomb. I just showed that it was there.”

Translated by Antidote, with minor adjustments based on a Das Magazin internal draft [26 January 2017]

Featured image: cartoon by Christiane Pfohlmann; text is untranslatable wordplay in which Trump is saying “I can’t do anything about it” and “I have Nix to thank.” Source: toonpool.com

Paul-Olivier Dehaye contributed to the preparation of the original article, which also included a link to his website where you can request your data from Cambridge Analytica: PersonalData.IO

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Trump order strips privacy rights from non-U.S. citizens, could nix EU-US data flows

An Executive Order signed by U.S. President Donald Trump in his first few days in office could jeopardize a six-month-old data transfer framework that enables EU citizens’ personal data to flow to the U.S. for processing — with the promise of ‘essentially equivalent’ privacy protection once it gets there.

Close to 1,500 companies have signed up to the framework so far, which only got up and running in August, following a multi-year negotiation process.

MEP Jan Philipp Albrecht, the European Parliament’s rapporteur on data protection regulation, tweeted earlier today suggesting that Trump’s presidential order, signed yesterday, might invalidate Privacy Shield.

Section 14 of the Executive Order signed by Trump — ostensibly aimed at enhancing domestic enforcement of U.S. immigration laws — reads:

Privacy Act. Agencies shall, to the extent consistent with applicable law, ensure that their privacy policies exclude persons who are not United States citizens or lawful permanent residents from the protections of the Privacy Act regarding personally identifiable information.

Earlier this month European Commissioner Vera Jourova said she would be traveling to the U.S. this spring to meet with the Trump administration to assess its commitment to the EU-US Privacy Shield.

The data transfer framework is also be due for its first annual review this summer.

Talks to agree the Privacy Shield stepped up urgently in October 2015 after the prior Safe Harbor arrangement was struck down by Europe’s top court, following a legal challenge related to U.S. Government mass surveillance programs. That self-certification regime had been operational for fifteen years.

The question now is whether the replacement EU-US data flow mechanism is about to come unstuck far more quickly — helped on its way by the Trump administration’s privacy-related policy choices.

According to Albrecht’s analysis, there could also be ramifications for another EU-US umbrella agreement, which covers data-sharing between law enforcement agencies in the two regions — with the MEP suggesting sanctioning the administration for making this executive order.

At the time of writing the MEP could not be reached for comment.

It’s not clear at this point exactly how damaging the policy change might be to the continued functioning of Privacy Shield — that depends on how important the extensibility of the U.S. Privacy Act to non-U.S. citizens was during the EU Privacy Shield negotiations, and whether another relevant piece of U.S. legislation (the Judicial Redress Act) is also affected by Trump’s executive order.

But the order on “Enhancing Public Safety in the Interior of the United States” certainly looks likely to deepen concerns about the legal robustness of the EU-US data transfer mechanism, given it’s explicitly seeking to strip away privacy protections from non-U.S. citizens. Aka the opposite of what the European Commission was intent on achieving during negotiations.

A spokeswoman for the Commission told TechCrunch it does not have a statement on the implications of Trump’s executive order at present — but did confirm: “We’re looking at it at the moment.” Update: The spokeswoman has now sent us a statement in which the EC asserts that Privacy Shield “does not rely on the protections under the U.S. Privacy Act”.

On the Umbrella Agreement the spokeswoman said this relies on the Judicial Redress Act which she said “extends the benefits of the U.S. Privacy Act to Europeans and gives them access to U.S. courts”.

“We will continue to monitor the implementation of both instruments and are following closely any changes in the U.S. that might have an effect on European’s data protection rights,” she added.

The Commission does look to have fired a warning shot across the U.S. administration’s bows at a privacy conference taking place in Brussels this week, by reiterating that if adequate protection for EU citizen’s personal data under U.S. law can no longer be guaranteed then the framework would indeed have to be suspended.

.@EU_Commission : If adequacy is no longer guaranteed, we will have to suspend the #PrivacyShield #cpdp2017

— Laura Kayali (@LauKaya) January 25, 2017

Any suspension of Privacy Shield would mean a return to legal uncertainty for the 1,500+ businesses currently processing EU data in the U.S. via this authorization framework — which includes the likes of Facebook, Twitter, Google and Microsoft. (You can find a full list of sign-ups here.)

A key sticking point in the lengthy EU-US Privacy Shield negotiations was the need for the arrangement to ensure essential equivalence of privacy protections for European citizens’ data in the U.S. — so there really can be little doubt that a presidential order seeking to strip privacy protections from Europeans (regardless of the stated intent) will be viewed very dimly by EU officials.

Compare and contrast Trump’s order with a policy directive signed by President Obama at the start of 2014 — which imposed limits on U.S. agencies’ use of signals intelligence collected in bulk with the stated aim of protecting “the privacy and civil liberties of all persons, whatever their nationality and regardless of where they might reside” [emphasis mine].

Obama’s extension of privacy protections to non-U.S. citizens was lauded as a very positive step by EU officials during the Privacy Shield negotiations. So it’s hard not to conclude the trajectory of the new U.S. administration vis-a-vis privacy and foreigners does not bode well for easy data flows between the two regions.

Earlier this month, as the inauguration of President Trump loomed, the Commission was already signalling public concern about the U.S.’ response to questions it sent following the Yahoo email scanning scandal — after news broke last fall the company had built a custom scanning tool at the behest of U.S. intelligence agencies to enable real-time keyword scanning of the incoming email of all Yahoo users.

On that issue Jourova complained the U.S. response had been tardy and lacking in detail. “This is not how we understand good, quick and full exchange of information,” she told Reuters in an interview earlier this month.

Critics of Privacy Shield –– including the lawyer who brought the original challenge against Safe Harbor — have consistently argued the arrangement contains the same fundamental flaws as its invalidated predecessor, given ongoing U.S. government agency surveillance programs accessing European citizens’ data.

And even before President Trump’s signing-in the Privacy Shield had attracted its first legal challenge. (Which might well find fresh fuel for its fight in Trump’s executive order.)

But the European Commission has previously rejected these structural criticisms of the framework — professing itself satisfied with “assurances” secured from the Obama administration that any access to personal data for law enforcement or national security would be “limited to what is necessary and proportionate”, and arguing the mechanism strengthens privacy protections via new components such as an ombudsperson to handle complaints, and an annual review of how Privacy Shield is operating.

However the arrival of Trump could really put the cat among the Commission’s pigeons.

Its overarching aim for Privacy Shield has been to grease the wheels of digital commerce by providing a streamlined mechanism for authorizing EU-US personal data transfers, while achieving an adequate level of compliance with European privacy law. But the new U.S. administration’s priorities on immigration and on business suggest Trump’s America is intent on pulling in a very different direction.

Other data transfer mechanisms for enabling the processing of EU personal data in the U.S. do exist but are generally more complex for businesses to comply with. And their legality has also been called into question.

pieni pepsi wrote:Hyvä kirjoitus, en tosin ymmärrä että miten tämä pääsee yllättämään jonkun. Jo pelkkä perinteinenkin mainonta on viime vuosina muuttunut niin röyhkeäksi, että en edes tiedä kuinka monta kertaa facebookin mainokset ovat tienneet mitä minä tarvitsen tai missä minä olen ihan ilman mitään google-hakujakin. Tällainen poliittisen agendan kohdennettu mainostaminen on ihan luontaista jatkumoa sille, mitä yritykset ovat tehneet internetissä jo vuosia. Me annetaan ihan itse lupa sen toteuttamiseen hyväksymällä palveluiden ja sovellusten täysin älyttömiä käyttöehtoja, eikä siinä paljon moraaliset asiat paina palveluiden tarjoajien vaakakupissa kun pitää tahkota rahaa. Itse en tykkäile juuri mistään facebookissa tai muuallakaan ja silti koen tuon kohdentamisen toimivan pelottavan hyvin, joten olis kyllä kiinnostavaa tietää miten toi tiedonkeruu näkyy jonkun tosi aktiivisesti somea käyttävän ihmisen elämässä.

sössön sössön wrote:heviä kamaa

ja itseä pidettiin aikoinaan paranoidina kun en suostunu tekemään facebooktiliä tai hain muualta ku googlesta

win7sucks wrote: Juuri tämän vuoksi en edes käytä mitään FB:tä tai muita urkintasovelluksia.
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