Cathy O'Neil Quotes

Everyone and his Big Brother wants to log your browsing habits, the better to build a profile of who you are and how you live your life - online and off. Search engine companies offer a benefit in return: more relevant search results. The more they know about you, the better they can tailor information to your needs.

Social media has become a primary factor in political campaigns.

The more Zuckerberg knows about you, the more media he will be able to bring you.

Netflix and Amazon know when you stop and start a program, whether you wanted the whole thing, all of that.

Google is omniscient of what people search for and do. Facebook has over a billion subscribers, meaning Mark Zuckerberg has personal information about one in every seven people on Earth. U.S.A., Brazil, Mexico, India and Indonesia are at the top of that list.

Personalization can be very useful in some contexts but very harmful in others. Searching for pizza online, it's probably OK to keep showing the same pizza shop as your No. 1 choice. I don't see any big political consequences out of that.

Marketers use big data profiling to predict who is about to get pregnant, who is likely to buy a new car, and who is about to change sexual orientations. That's how they know what ads to send to whom. The NSA, meanwhile, wants to know who is likely to commit an act of terrorism - and for this, they need us.

Facebook mistreats its users. Facebook is not your friend; it is a surveillance engine. For instance, if you browse the Web and you see a 'like' button in some page or some other site that has been displayed from Facebook. Therefore, Facebook knows that your machine visited that page.

Companies have long gathered data to break down their customer base into specific segments. Now political parties have become adept at micro-targeting, too, using data on shopping habits, leisure activities, voting histories, charity donations, and so on, in order to pinpoint likely supporters and the type of appeal most likely to win them over.

This could be a close election. I can pretty much tell which states are going to be close. If you would start two or three weeks before Election Day and saturate those critical states with [TV Advertising] spots, it could swing the election.

During the last 20 years the advent of radio changed all the old rules of political campaigning. Now the successful advent of television, available for the first time this year in a presidential campaign, must again influence the planning of the campaign. Television, with its triple advantages of sight, sound and motion, can make or break a candidate, a party or a platform. In my opinion television must not be considered as supplementary media but as the heart of your program to “win friends and influence people.”

Direct mail [campaigning] is never moderate by definition.

Political advertising works, particularly when it’s unrebutted.

Anybody who says negative commercials are wrong and shouldn't be used doesn't know anything about politics. The fact is people respond to those commercials.

In the 1972 election campaign the citizen would be the victim of the most sophisticated sales blizzard ever inflicted on any voting population anywhere.

To win [elections] in this country these days you've got to campaign down to a 13-year-old's level of mental development.

In a national campaign you are driven to negativism.

I'm not against T.V. advertising for campaigns, but we need to emphasize field campaigning much more than we do.

To political technocrats, 2008 marks the maturation of 'microtargeting' - a technique that, if things are as close in November as expected, may well affect who takes the White House.

Microtargeting, as its name implies, is a way to identify small but crucial groups of voters who might be won over to a given side, and which messages would do the trick.

You know you're not anonymous on our site. We're greeting you by name, showing you past purchases, to the degree that you can arrange to have transparency combined with an explanation of what the consumer benefit is.

For technology companies, information about what people do online is extremely valuable - it can be used to sell targeted advertising or sold to data clearinghouses.

Twitter has revealed some monstrous information in Congress: we spent money on our ad campaigns. Just as all the usual media organizations in the world do.

By now, we all know that our every move online can be tracked and traced, and that, ideally, services learn from and adapt to customers based on an artful deployment of that data.

I log on and there are so many cookies embedded in my computer - it's like they know what I need before I do.