I really love political data – so getting to use Dstillery’s billions of events and heavy duty machine learning pipeline to make a marketing piece for the start of election year 2016 was right up my alley. Together with my colleague Pete Ibarra (who I also collaborated with on our 2015 MIT-Sloan paper) we loaded our POI-based GIS with Iowa’s Caucusing locations and let the data roll in. It took a few days to compare the anonymized device ids to Dstillery’s Crafted Audiences but once we did the story got picked up in a big way:
- The new frontier of voter tracking (NPR Marketplace)
- Company tracked Iowa caucusgoers’ phones (USA Today)
- How this company tracked 16,000 Iowa caucus-goers via their phones (Fusion)
- Voter Surveillance: How Facebook Can Make You a Target For Political Campaigns (Social Daily News)
- Do Privacy Notices Matter? Comparing the Impact of Violating Formal Privacy Notices and Informal Privacy Norms on Consumer Trust Online (Journal of Legal Studies)