Data is the most valuable asset in the world.
Every time you work on a political campaign, half the people hate you. That's how it is.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm so tired of making excuses for old white men.
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.
There's a very low amount of data literacy around people.
Who knows more about the usage of personal data than Cambridge Analytica?
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 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.
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 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.
I think of myself as intelligent and strong and principled.
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.
To be honest, it's hard when you're knee-deep in the trenches of an industry to see it how others see it.
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've always had one completely nonaltruistic goal, which is to go to every country in the world.
