March 2018, Cambridge Analytica

"The two fundamental human driver when it comes to taking information on board effectively are hopes and fears, and many of those are unspoken and the even unconscious -- you didn't know that was a fear until you saw something that just evoked that reaction from you," Turnbull explained in a meeting with a reporter posing as "Ranjan," a prospective client from Sri Lanka.

 

New York Professor Joseph Campbell, 1974

"What builds the civilization and the cathedral is a mad aspiration of some kind. And as long as that lasts, people are pulling together. And if you don’t have an aspiration, then the only other thing that will pull people together so they will do something is fear. Either aspiration or fear, and then people will work together."

Executive Summary This report is prepared to study the issue Facebook recently faces. It is in news because of the Cambridge Analytica data scandal in which the personal information of Facebook us.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkUxejuwzsM

I came across an interesting quote of a former employee at Cambridge Analytica (company that ran political advertising for Trump in 2016, Brexit, and more) that admired the type of technology which Phunware is based on.

When testifying about her involvement with Cambridge Analytica—as the company was accused of stealing data from millions of voters—Brittney Kaiser (former Director of Business Development at Cambridge Analytica) was asked by the judge, “What do you think legislators should do in order to protect people’s data?”

She responded, “So I think the best way to move forward [is] for people to posses their data like their property.”

Cambridge Analytica founder Alexander Nix said in an interview, “We have a pretty substantial defense business. [The firm] actually trains the U.S. Army, U.S Special Forces. We train NATO, the CIA, State Department, Pentagon” (The Great Hack - A Netflix Documentary).

The former business development director (who now runs a campaign called #OwnYourData) of the company that got Trump elected, Britain to exit the EU, and trained federal government officials on the topic of political persuasion, is testifying that the best way to keep users’ political data private is for them to “own it like their property”.

This is exactly what Phunware allows users to do by monetizing their own political data as assets on a blockchain, with no third party gatekeeping your data besides you.

Cambridge Analytica used Facebook for data which in the terms and conditions permits the platform to take and sell your data despite your awareness. Phunware fixes this.

It’s definitely a good sign to me that the person who generated business for the company that got Trump elected in 2016 is admiring under testimony the general technology that Phunware uses in order to return data ownership and privacy to the user. Goes to show how Phunware’s type of technology may just be the future of compliant political advertising, particularly for Trump.