Cambridge analytica and data mining.

Byline: Waqar K Kauravi and Umar Waqar

KDD.org defines Data mining as the process of discovering patterns in large data sets involving methods at the intersection of machine learning, statistics, and database systems. With the 'Facebook Leaks' hitting the headlines in western media and disclosures by a whistle blower, data mining and psychographics has reached a new level in Non Kinetic Warfare.

Allegedly, a data mining company, Cambridge Analytica (CA), was instrumental in supporting elections in the US as well as affecting the Brexit campaign in the UK. Similar news is coming from India where both BJP and Congress are blaming each other for using services of subsidiaries of CA to affect perceptions of voters.

The involvement of CA in Pakistani politics has also been reported. As disclosed by Eurasia Future, 'CA has turned to Pakistan as its services were allegedly hired by ousted Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to rescue his political career and to make sure PML-N wins in upcoming election. CA firm was hired during the Panama scandal case, as part of the campaign to smear the judiciary. However, after disqualification, Nawaz Sharif, instructed CA to help promote his party throughout the current election cycle'.

Geoplitica.ru a Russian blog posted an article on 13 March by Tayab Baloch with the title 'Hacking democracy; Cambridge Analytica turns to Pakistan'. It states, 'biased news reporting against the judiciary has hinted that under the procurement of Nawaz, CA has taken control over Pakistani news rooms. The trend of fake news in Pakistan was accelerated by this big data firm through biased reporting. They are trying to manipulate data and the people who come into contact with this data for their own purposes'.

What are the pitfalls of unsafe social media usage by individuals and groups and how the individual's private information is being exploited by large conglomerates like Facebook in connivance with data mining companies; these are some of the questions this article attempts to decipher.

A whistleblower, Christopher Wylie, has revealed to the Observer how CA, a company owned by the hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, and headed at the time by Trump's key adviser Steve Bannon, used personal information taken without authorization in early 2014 to build a system that could profile individual US voters, in order to target them with personalized political advertisements.

Wylie who worked with a Cambridge University academic to obtain...

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