• by Steve Smith , Staff Writer @popeyesm, January 5, 2015

The stories about political campaigns making sophisticated use of data sets to target their appeals in the last several political cycles are legion, if sometime overblown. Team Obama in 2012 made a lot of noise about its ability to leverage online data in order to target their TV buys in unprecedented ways. The density of supporter profiles were clear to just about anyone on the Obama email list. The result of both the campaign and the team’s self-promotion was a lot of consultancy jobs for veterans of the program.

All signs suggest that what was bleeding-edge in 2008 and 2012 became de rigueur in 2014. Data mining for voters has become a core competency, according to a new piece on the practice at Politco, which explores how politicians likely will insulate themselves and their campaign practices from regulatory limits.   

As the lengthy piece demonstrates, campaigns and PACs are using every shred of public information possible to find sympathetic potential voters, from scraping Facebook profiles and postings to onboarding hunting license records. The core argument of the Politico piece is that even as many of these same politicians raged over the U.S. government’s harvesting of telephone data and other broad sweeps of citizen activity, it was the politicians themselves who were pressing the bounds of privacy in their techniques for mining both anonymized and personally identifiable information.

Still, the Politico piece is not sophisticated enough to distinguish between aggregated anonymous data and PII. Its author cites one company that wants to hawk audiences that sought out Viagra information, but I am guessing that is little more than cookie reading.

But the aggressive use of public and personally identifiable data is characteristic of these political campaigns. Apparently campaigns and parties are cross-referencing public and anonymous data as fast as they can to build targetable profiles for the 2016 cycle.

But what is striking here is that the very politicians privacy watchdogs were hoping to recruit for data privacy regulations are themselves among the greatest beneficiaries of unfettered data mining. The incoming Federal Election Commission chairwoman Ann Ravel quickly retreated from an earlier acknowledgment of the problem of data and politics. Now she readily admits that the FEC is not necessarily looking at “regulation” because “that word scares everybody.” The new Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley splits a fine hair by claiming that scrutiny should be on those harvesting the data that is for sale, not the politicians who use it.

Well, nice try. If NYU professor Ira Rubinstein and his extensive April report on voter privacy and big data is to be believed, the politicians themselves are the data hoarders. His research shows that political parties and their operatives have built profiles of hundreds of millions of voters, probably the largest unregulated pile of personal data in America.  Rubinstein demonstrates the myriad ways in which public and inferred data sets are combined and shared in undisclosed ways, how many volunteers and operatives have open access to much of this data, and how politicians rationalize the problem away. And in the end, political culture falls back on First Amendment protection of free political speech as a hedge against constraints.  The full and extremely well documented and argued article from the Wisconsin Law Review is available in full here.

One has to wonder how the heightened scrutiny of campaign data mining affects the larger issue of commercial data and personal privacy rights. Unless politicians carve out exceptions for themselves (certainly in the realm of possibility), it seems unlikely they will bite the hands that feed them.