You’re right; I get the same ads for any product I’ve even looked at. But we know about and expect this, even though it’s creepy.
I don’t like this at all. Just how would Cruz offer an opt-in? He’d have to be in some kind of contact with the person first to do that. And no, I wouldn’t trust him more than anyone else to mine my personal information for his campaign.
I’ve been an obvious Cruz and Trump supporter in Facebook for months, and I even “follow” Trump there, but who do you think got my email address for my busy political-friends box? Neither of them, not once. Instead I get bombed by Carson, in whom I’ve never expressed any interest online because I have none. That would lead me to believe the Carson campaign does this, if it had anything to find. (I don’t mind much; it’s fun to mark all the Carson bombs as Spam.)
But do we really believe this, from WaPo?
The data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica has reps embedded in the campaign who pinpoint voters based on psychographic qualities — a mishmash of one’s personal traits, attitudes, values, opinions, and general lifestyle — to determine how open someone might be to supporting Cruz. Then, it apparently uses the same process to determine which messages would be most likely to earn that person’s support. harnesses over a hundred different categories of publicly available information — (age, historical party affiliation, social media and magazine subscriptions — for each registered voter. Potential supporters have no idea they are being targeted so specifically so ‘opt-in’ must be a very general term for voters expressing interest in the candidate.