# IWDK21 - TRUST & TECH
Brittany Kaiser calls herself a whistleblower because the evidence she brought to light potentially wouldn ’ t have been made available to investigators and the press otherwise .
example , in the Trump presidential campaign they were able to target people , who were on the fence , in important swing states and specific constituencies where undecided voters would make all the difference to the final result . Hillary Clinton got a higher number of votes overall but because of the way the American election system is set up , Donald Trump won because he got the votes in the right areas for the most efficient result .
But data-driven tools are not only used for campaigns spreading fake news , misinformation and hatred . To Kaiser , the Obama campaign is a good example of a campaign using data-driven tools to achieve a positive outcome - no matter your political beliefs :
“ The bare minimum when it comes to using data-driven tools is to follow the law of the country . But in most countries we don ’ t have national laws on data protection so we have to go further and care about data ethics . The Obama campaign had ethical rules around how they used these platforms , which is that we were going to run a 100 percent positive campaign ,” Kaiser says .
A 100 percent positive campaign means that the campaigners would never send a negative message , never use it to target people with something negative about an opposing candidate and they wouldn ’ t use it to spread rumours about someone else in the race . This way the tools are being used to get people interested in politics , who would not otherwise engage with policies and topics that do otherwise affect their day-to-day lives .
A new playing field The campaigning of today is very far from past times ’ door knocking , political TV-ads and posters . Each individual vote has perhaps never mattered more because campaigns , either using data-driven tools in a positive or negative way , can make people , who don ’ t usually go to the ballot box , have an impact on the final results of the vote .
“ When the Brexit campaign was first announced , we wanted to get involved at Cambridge Analytica . I was told that we had pitched the Remain-campaign but they said they were going to win so they didn ’ t want to pay expensive political consultants ,” she says while shaking her head :
“ Being a British company working in politics , we wanted to get involved in something so I pitched Leave . EU and eventually drew up a contract for them ,” Kaiser says .
To a lot of people in Europe and across the world the Brexit result was surprising and shocking . But when you dig deeper into the content people were being exposed to at the right place and the right time ‘ the will of the people ’ starts to look a bit more blurry .
“ When the story broke about Cambridge Analytica it caused a lot of scepticism with people . Since then I ’ ve seen an incredibly positive momentum of people who actually think about what they ’ re doing when they ’ re using technology ,” Kaiser says . In her opinion , the most important focus has to be on children . “ We have an opportunity for kids , who are very young , to have control over all of their data and not grow up in a world where their personal information is in millions of databases around the world and they have no control over how it ’ s used ,” Kaiser says .
Education and data ownership are two of the most important parts of her foundation # OwnYourData and her work in general .
“ We have a huge opportunity in front of us with data ownership , which is my favourite topic . If we can give ourselves the rights over our own data and participate in this multi-trillion dollar industry that exists made out of our own information then we have the ability to at minimum feed ourselves every day with the value we create off of that . We can create a global universal earned income out of this industry very easily . It ’ s the most tangible proposal to rid the world of extreme poverty and some of the systems are starting to be built just now ,” Kaiser says .
In Autumn 2021 Kaiser will do a talk for Internet Week Denmark where she will shed a light on her work , her story and what she thinks the future has in store in terms of data ownership .
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