Every political ad in your Facebook feed, video on your YouTube video, and flyer in your mailbox is now crafted to fit your specific personality and interests using intimate data about your preferences and habits.
When that little box pops up on your screen and asks if you “agree” to the terms and conditions and you click to make it go away, you just surrendered your search history to a data-collection agency.
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When you swipe your credit card, buy a mobile app, sign up for an email list — you add more data to your personal package of information that is up for grabs from those with the cash to buy — and some of the biggest buyers are those looking to win your vote.
“Anything you buy with your credit card … anything you do online, anything that is traceable, is up for grabs.” — Pam Dixon, World Privacy Forum
“Anything you buy with your credit card … anything you do online, anything that is traceable, is up for grabs,” Pam Dixon, founder of the World Privacy Forum, told LifeZette.
Campaign consultants know your name, what religion you are, and whether you are regularly attend church. They know if you own a single-family home, and they also know what it’s worth compared to your neighbors’ houses.
And they know more — lots more. They know what websites you visit, whether you’ve bought “50 Shades of Grey” or the biography of Pope John Paul II, and the magazines you buy. They even know if you purchase antiques or sports memorabilia, prefer dogs or cats and which charities you favor.
When politicians are looking for hooks to win your vote at election time, they turn to data farms, places that mine raw data and package them into hundreds, even thousands, of categories. Want to know who buys guns? These guys. Need to know who shops at discount stores? Those guys.
“You’ve got to know what people buy and don’t buy. What car they drive. How much money they make. How many kids do they have. When they vote,” Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Preibus said in a June interview on “The Laura Ingraham Show.”
One of the data packages obtained by LifeZette was used in a 2014 campaign and has 291 “data points” about each voter. Privacy experts say that package is relatively small. Other packages contain 1,000 items or more about each named voter.
This vast array of personal information is used to target possible voters and to refine campaign messaging for many small or large groups of like-minded voters, even cat lovers.
“Data has been at the heart of winning campaigns ever since Abe Lincoln directed the Whigs to make a ‘perfect list of all the voters,’” said Nicole Schlinger.
“Data has been at the heart of winning campaigns ever since Abe Lincoln directed the Whigs to make a ‘perfect list of all the voters’,” said Nicole Schlinger, president of Campaign HQ and an Iowa political consultant. “What has dramatically changed is our ability to collect, analyze and use millions of data points to find and mobilize individual voters.”
The flood of new data has revived many outreach tactics that were secondary during the highpoint of television as the dominant medium for political messaging.
“We’re seeing a resurgence of ‘old school’ techniques, like phone calls and door knocking, to deliver the right message to each individual,” said Schlinger.
Only this time, they’re knocking on just the right doors, armed with your own data.
The most advanced political operations are modeling beyond voter behavior, down to the core of a person’s personality.
“We’ve modeled every personality of every voter in the United States,” Alexander Nix, CEO of the data firm Cambridge Analytica, said in a Nov. 3 interview with Yahoo News.
The firm uses an algorithm to model personality types of voters and determine the correctly crafted message to appeal to them, beyond their voter type.
“It’s sort of obvious when you think about it,” Nix said, “but the more you know about someone, the better you can communicate with them.”
The power of big data was demonstrated in March 2014, when Republicans scored an upset victory in Florida’s special election for Congress. Operatives at the Republican National Committee, including a poached engineer from Facebook, built a customized database — they called it “Honeybadger.”
It was advanced enough to update itself constantly with new data about voters. It recommended particular messages for target audiences, and it allowed strategists to spot problems.
The system alerted strategists their candidate was running behind in the race for absentee votes. The campaign staff was then able to redirect funds to boost absentee votes by launching a barrage of phone calls and mailing flyers to sympathetic voters who hadn’t yet mailed in a ballot.
Honeybadger triumphed when Republican David Jolly defeated Democrat Alex Sink by fewer than 2 percentage points. Now he’s in the congressional seat once occupied by Rep. C. W. “Bill” Young, in Florida’s Pinellas County, and running for the open seat being vacated by now Sen. Marco Rubio.
The election-day success of big-data has created a partisan arms race. Both sides are now spending heavily to rent more data about more voters in more districts in more elections.
“What was only possible for a presidential campaign a few years ago, is feasible for congressional and even some state-level races.”
“With each passing election cycle, data tools are becoming more accessible and affordable,” Schlinger said. “What was only possible for a presidential campaign a few years ago is feasible for congressional and even some state-level races.”
But advocates for voters’ privacy are alarmed.
Data in the hands of companies or politicians is “deemed marketing data (and) can be used for any purpose with no regulation,” Dixon said.
Worse, the data are being used by politicians for their own benefit, so there’s little hope of reform legislation, Dixon said.
“As long as we have a majority of politicians relying on data-brokerage data to win elections, I don’t see how we will ever get reform,” she said. “To me, that’s the crux of the problem.”
Schlinger pointed out that privacy worries are part of a larger question about the role of consumer data in the market. The worries “aren’t necessarily limited to the political arena,” she said.
“Consumers should always be mindful of how and when they share personal data, and always read privacy policies.”
No, that doesn’t mean you have to take a day off work to read the 20,701-word terms and conditions for your new iPhone. But it does mean you should be aware that everything you do online, someone — somewhere — is watching, mining for data.
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