Campaigns’ use of
supporters’ data worries privacy advocates
By Craig Timberg,
Published: November 20 | Updated: Wednesday, November 21, 5:00 AM
Shortly before Election
Day, a Stanford graduate student reported that the campaign Web sites of both
President Obama and Republican Mitt Romney were “leaking” personal information
about their supporters through careless data handling.
Had it been Facebook and
Google, a federal investigation might have ensued, and the companies could have
suffered significant public relations setbacks and perhaps fines. But the
Federal Trade Commission, the government agency most focused on personal
privacy, has no jurisdiction over campaigns or political groups.
That is a small example of
what privacy advocates say is a big problem with efforts to protect personal
information in the United States: The politicians are not guarding the chicken
coop. They are the foxes.
Obama’s sophisticated use
of Big Data gave him a crucial edge in what, based on popular support alone,
should have been a close election. Republicans are desperate to catch up. But
it’s not clear who is positioned to protect the rights of voters at a time when
politicians from both parties increasingly build their campaigns on the
insights that commercial data brokers provide.
Washington has a community
of professional privacy advocates at places such as the ACLU, the Electronic
Privacy Information Center and the Center for Digital Democracy. Jeff Chester,
executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, said he approached
lawmakers from both parties to express his concerns long before the election.
But he got nowhere.
“Maybe we’re digital Don
Quixotes,” Chester said. “There was a lack of interest, not surprisingly.”
People routinely tell
pollsters that they’re concerned about online privacy, and Chester and his
colleagues in the field count some allies on Capitol Hill and in the White
House. The FTC under Chairman Jon Leibowitz and David Vladeck, head of its
Bureau of Consumer Protection, have made the agency far more aggressive on
consumer privacy generally — even if political campaigns are beyond their
reach.
Yet overall the laws in
the United States are much less strict than in Europe, where there are tight
limits on what personal information can be collected and how long it can be
kept. Companies caught crossing the line can provoke furious backlashes among
their users.
The American political
landscape, by comparison, is amorphous when it comes to privacy. There are
widespread concerns on both the right and left but no single, coherent
constituency demanding greater protections.
For all the talk in recent
years about online privacy, data-hungry Google remains the most popular search
engine and data-hungry Facebook the most popular social media site. Both worked
closely with the campaigns and also have growing lobbying operations in
Washington. Google’s Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt was a regular visitor at
Obama’s Chicago campaign headquarters, say those who worked there, offering
advice to the campaign’s data-savvy technologists.
Privacy advocates say the
tide will eventually turn, when Americans truly understand the extent to which
their information is collected and traded. A recent poll by the University of
Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communications found that nearly two-thirds
of people would be less likely to support a candidate who bought data about
voters’ online activities and used it to tailor political ads.
“People still don’t quite
understand this stuff,” said Joseph Turow, the lead researcher on the Annenberg
poll. He said politicians are “hoping people will, quote-unquote, get used to
it.”
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