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Comment by m3rc

6 hours ago

What's up with the part of the website where you are talking about "neutralized foreign actors", was that also using contracted Mechanical Turk labor?

The industry is so backwards, there are residential proxy companies that are directly paid by one of the largest market research firms. I have discussed this at length https://www.reddit.com/r/Marketresearch/comments/1s2tl0o/ope...

It should be a bipartisan issue that a Swedish company is paying a UAE Residential Proxy company [1] to build tools that allow people from anywhere in the world to take US political polls that are used by both parties to collect election data.

Just for starters, you can't even think about soliciting online work from a panel without a robust residential proxy detection methods. We had to build our own:

`wget -N 'https://grip.net/files/grip-proxy-30d.mmdb'`

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOmeQcwSK3o flagged by Nokia Deepfield and CTRL for it's involvement in botnets

  • Polling data isn't some guaranteed right or something. If you ask the Internet questions and then sell the collated answers, it's your job to authenticate the responses or your polls will be wildly wrong and people will stop buying them.

    Which is already the case and nobody but a bunch of campaign contractors who can't justify their do nothing jobs anymore cares.

  • Someone using an IP that a geoip database says is US, doesn't mean that person is a US voter. The existence of proxies on the internet is a feature.

    • Obviously, a problem not even fully addressed by L2’s datasets. Sure, but the use of proxies to masquerade the identity of users being sold to researcher buyers that paid for a different service is fraud

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