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.
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What I learned in 2017, teaching digital psychology
Last year was a big year for AlterSpark, when we achieved the highest levels of student satisfaction, while rolling out more content and teaching innovations than in any prior year. Whether you’re a teacher or potential student, in this blog, I’ll share my teaching...
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CLAIM 1: It only takes 21-days to form a habit
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...
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10 misleading claims about digital psychology
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...
read moreArtificial emotional intelligence is near
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.
Emotions are so hard to study, many scientists ignore them.
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MIT Inspired our Digital Psychology Lab in Kensington Market
A few years back, Dr. Stibe (http://cp.media.mit.edu/agnis-stibe/) invited me to present my research on emotions to the MIT Media Lab, while we also kicked off our study on persuasive backfiring (http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/108479). But what I didn’t expect,...
read moreUsing Attachment Anxiety in Emotional Design & Marketing
How companies use social pain, to stop customers from leaving By Brian Cugelman, PhD with editorial production from Debra Weinryb When it comes to emotional design, people typically talk about positive emotions and user experiences, like how products can make people...
read moreWorkshop Scholarship Winners (Sep-Dec 2016)
We are excited to announce our latest round of winners of the AlterSpark’s scholarship program that provides complementary digital psychology training access to graduate students and members of social purpose organizations who use technology to build a better world....
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