I’m not sure the people at Victoria’s AggregateIQ recognize themselves in the way they have been portrayed.
In testimony to a British House of Commons committee last week, Chris Wylie — the 28-year-old Victorian who might go down in history as The Man Who Took Down Facebook — painted AggregateIQ as a win-at-all-costs franchise of Britain’s SCL Group. SCL is the parent of Cambridge Analytica, a company accused of improperly using the data of 50 million Facebook users, and one with ties to U.S. conservatives Steve Bannon and Robert Mercer, names that reek of political power.
AggregateIQ, though, can present another picture, that of an independent little tech company that might do contract work for international clients like SCL, but that has also been pitching its services to local politicians and other clients since 2011, long before SCL came along, and has continued to do so long after its work with the British company ended.
Also, if revelations about the data-driven marriage of IT and politics trouble those of us who haven’t been paying attention to how modern political campaigns get their messages out, AggregateIQ might argue that its practices are neither improper nor uncommon.
That doesn’t mean AggregateIQ doesn’t have plenty of questions to answer. It does.
But it’s worth remembering that so far we have only heard one side and that there has been a lot of piling-on as, despite AggregateIQ’s protestations, the company’s name has become mixed up with that of Cambridge Analytica and the Facebook scandal. (For the record, AggregateIQ has explicitly denied having access to any Facebook data obtained improperly by Cambridge Analytica.) Last week, when the mere fact that AggregateIQ had done work for the Green Party prior to the 2017 provincial election proved enough to spook the party into alerting its members, you knew AggregateIQ had an image problem. There was no indication of wrongdoing, but just the mention of the company’s name got the Greens worked up.
The people at AggregateIQ could, of course, help their own cause by stepping forward to fully explain their relationship with SCL, or to answer more questions about their role in the Brexit campaign.
They’re working away in their new downtown offices, the ones they moved into after leaving Market Square, but for whatever reason — non-disclosure agreements? — their response to the media storm has been largely limited to some written statements (among them: AggregateIQ is a digital advertising, web and software development company, is wholly Canadian owned and operated, has never been part of Cambridge Analytica or SCL, and complies with all legal and regulatory requirements in all jurisdictions where it operates).
AggregateIQ’s principals, Jeff Silvester and Zack Massingham, have been more open in the past. They have hardly projected the image of black-ops agents.
For whatever reason, they have felt compelled to keep their heads down this time. Here’s hoping they lift them up soon, and that they feel free to tell the side of the story we have not yet heard.
It will also be good to hear the results of various privacy-office investigations. It has become clear that Canadians (and the rest of the connected world) need a conversation about how online information is collected — legally or not — and used by political campaigns and others who wish to influence opinion. Most of us have little understanding. When the British committee heard Wylie’s testimony last week, he spent much of the 3 1/2 hours explaining data-related concepts to the politicians in a way that the New York Times said resembled “a patient grandson trying to set up a Skype call with his gran.”
When the same committee later released a pile of documents provided by Wylie — including contracts between SCL and AggregateIQ, and other communications in which the Victoria company was involved — there was enough vaguely sinister techno-language to stock a Jason Bourne movie. A March 2014 agreement to build the Ripon campaign-management software used by Republicans in the 2014 U.S. mid-term election spoke of “making SCL’s behavioural microtargeting data actionable.” A November 2013 contract with a political party in Trinidad-Tobago called for the collection of internet browsing histories and other online information that would “contribute to psychographic profiling.” Another agreement spoke of “microtargeting and behavioural microtargeting” to mobilize supporters of a conservative group called ForAmerica.org.
That language might sound House of Cardsish, but is it really unusual for that realm? Dan O’Sullivan of California-based Upguard — a cyber security firm that went public last week after it found what it says was Ripon-related code on AggregateIQ’s website — said it’s not rare for political campaigns to try to harvest enough online data to build profiles of voters and target them with messaging based on that information. The Obama campaign did it. So did Trump’s. So if you accuse data-driven political consultancies of trying to influence how people think, they can reply that, yes, that’s their job.
