A contentious question on the California ballot in 2008 inspired a simple online innovation: a website called Eightmaps.com. The number in the name referred to Proposition 8, which called for the state’s constitution to be amended to prohibit gay marriage. Under California’s campaign finance laws, all donations greater than $100 to groups advocating for or against Proposition 8 were recorded in a publicly accessible database. Someone (it’s still not clear who) took all the data about the proposition’s supporters—their names and zip codes, and their employers in some cases—and plotted it on a Google map.
After finding themselves on the map, several supporters of the gay-marriage ban said they were harassed or their businesses were boycotted. This unsettled even some opponents of Proposition 8; surely it wouldn’t be long, they said, before, say, religious fundamentalists created a similar tool to call out supporters of a gay-rights measure. The committee that had backed Proposition 8 asked a federal judge to strike down the disclosure law or raise its threshold beyond $100 so that more people could give anonymously. But he refused, arguing that ballot measures need the “sunshine” that donation disclosure provides. His ruling was aligned with the idea that as much data as possible about the political process should be revealed.
To read the full, original article click on this link: Review: The Problem with Our Data Obsession | MIT Technology Review
