Surveillance-based manipulation: How Facebook or Google could tilt elections

[Commentary] Companies like Google and Facebook sit at the center of our communications. This gives them enormous power to manipulate and control. There are unique harms that come from using surveillance data in politics. Election politics is very much a type of marketing, and politicians are starting to use personalized marketing’s capability to discriminate as a way to track voting patterns and better “sell” a candidate or policy position. Candidates and advocacy groups can create ads and fundraising appeals targeted to particular categories: people who earn more than $100,000 a year, gun owners, people who have read news articles on one side of a particular issue, unemployed veterans... anything you can think of. They can target outraged ads to one group of people, and thoughtful policy-based ads to another.

They can also finely tune their get-out-the-vote campaigns on Election Day and more efficiently gerrymander districts between elections. This will likely have fundamental effects on democracy and voting. Psychological manipulation -- based both on personal information and control of the underlying systems -- will get better and better. Even worse, it will become so good that we won’t know we’re being manipulated.

[Bruce Schneier is a cryptographer and security expert]