Data about potential voters-who they are, where they are, and how to reach them-is an extremely valuable commodity during an election year.
It's not possible to fully shield yourself from all this data processing, but you can take steps to at least minimize and understand it.
Political campaigns use the same invasive tricks that behavioral ads do-pulling in data from a variety of sources online to create a profile-so they can target you.
Your digital trail is a critical tool for campaigns, but the process starts in the real world, where longstanding techniques to collect data about you can be useful indicators of how you'll vote.
If you live in a state with citizen initiative ballot measures, data collected from signature sheets might be shared or used as well.
Specific details are often a mystery, as a political advertising profile may be created by combining disparate information-from consumer scoring data brokers like Acxiom or Experian, smartphone data, and publicly available voter information-into a jumble of data points that's often hard to trace in any meaningful way.
The campaign then turns to a data broker to enhance this list with consumer information.
The data broker combines the voter list with its own data, then creates a behavioral profile using inferences based on your shopping, hobbies, demographics, and more.
In 2020, Open Secrets found political groups paid 37 different data brokers at least $23 million for access to services or data.
These data brokers collect information from browser cookies, web beacons, mobile phones, social media platforms, and more.
A sample of some categories and inferences in a political data broker file that we received through a CCPA request shows the wide variety of assumptions these companies may make.
These political data brokers make a lot of promises to campaigns.
TargetSmart claims to have 171 million highly accurate cell phone numbers, and i360 claims to have data on 220 million voters.
Some of these companies target based on location data.
In the case of connected televisions, ads can also integrate data based on what you've watched, using information collected through automated content recognition.
Finally, there are Facebook and Google, two companies that have amassed a mountain of data points about all their users, and which allow campaigns to target based on some of those factors.
Unlike the data brokers discussed above, most of what you see on Facebook and Google is derived from the data collected by the company from its users.
Managing the flow of all this data might feel impossible, but you can take a few important steps to minimize what's out there.
Install Privacy BadgerConsidering how much data is collected just from your day-to-day web browsing, it's a good idea to protect that first.
That's why EFF supports comprehensive consumer data privacy legislation, including a ban on online behavioral ads.
This Cyber News was published on www.eff.org. Publication date: Tue, 16 Apr 2024 20:28:03 +0000