Using Amazon’s MTurk to harvest 50 million Facebook profiles, and manipulate people
You may have heard the story that 50+ million Facebook user accounts were harvested by CA (CA). Or maybe you heard it was Global Science Research (GSR); or was it Dr. Alexander Kogan, or that Nix guy? Still, you may have heard it was an inside job, facilitated by Facebook staff, or a data breach from lax security. Or was it was carried out with Peter Thiel's data-mining company Plantir, or the daughter of Eric Schmidt, Google's former CEO and Burning Man buddy. What few people were discussing, was Amazon's role in facilitating the data access. Specifically, their microtask site called Mechanical Turk. Few people know about the online community that chronicles what happened, which anyone can access. It tells a story from the perspective of Amazon's microtask workers, who granted access to their Facebook accounts.
Many people believe that it only takes 21 days to form a habit. If this were true, then every 21 days, you'd be rewiring your brain to prefer a healthier diet, crave exercise, automatically tune-out your favorite guilty-pleasure, and achieve just about every single goal you routinely fail to achieve. There's a good chance that if you've attempted to make any of these changes, that you struggled, failed in your first attempt, tried again and failed again, and then maybe if you kept at it, after several months to a year, you finally nailed it.
I don't know about you, but my Facebook feed is full of sponsored content promising to double my email subscription list, attract 10-times more website visitors, and convert 50% more users. Claims like these are motivating, and can pull people in to take a closer look. However, what really counts, is the ability of the person who makes these claims, to offer you a viable path to those outcomes.
There’s a simple reason why you need to understand how emotions work, and it's this: emotions drive people’s decisions, not rational thinking. So if you want to understand how to build more persuasive tech, you’d better invest some time to learn how emotions work.